The Real Culprit
by Batmanrishi
Summary: When supermodel Ginevra Prewitt falls down the balcony of her house, the police declare it as a suicide. But someone is not convinced and calls in Private Detective Harry Potter. Potter a war hero in Afghanistan is now a Detective. He is down to his knees in debt and grabs the case like a lifeline. But can he solve it without getting too deeply involved.
1. Chapter 1

Prologue

_Is d__e__mum__mis__e__r__E__st, cui__u__s nobil__i__tas mis__e__rias__nobi__l__i__t__at._

Unhappy is he whose fame makes his misfortunes famous.

Lucius Accius, _T__e__lephus_

THE BUZZ IN THE STREET was like the humming of flies. Photographers stood massed behind barriers patrolled by police, their long-snouted cameras poised, and their breath rising like steam. Snow fell steadily on to hats and shoulders; gloved fingers wiped lenses clear. From time to time there came outbreaks of desultory clicking, as the watchers filled the waiting time by snapping the white canvas tent in the middle of the road, the entrance to the tall red-brick apartment block behind it, and the balcony on the top floor from which the body had fallen.

Behind the tightly packed paparazzi stood white vans with enormous satellite dishes on the roofs, and journalists talking, some in foreign languages, while soundmen in headphones hovered. Between recordings, the reporters stamped their feet and warmed their hands on hot beakers of coffee from the teeming café a few streets away. To fill the time, the woolly-hatted cameramen filmed the backs of the photographers, the balcony, the tent concealing the body, then repositioned themselves for wide shots that encompassed the chaos that had exploded inside the sedate and snowy Mayfair Street, with its lines of glossy black doors framed by white stone porticos and flanked by topiary shrubs. The entrance to number 18 was bounded with tape. Police officials, some of them white-clothed forensic experts, could be glimpsed in the hallway beyond.

The television stations had already had the news for several hours. Members of the public were crowding at either end of the road, held at bay by more police; some had come, on purpose, to look, others had paused on their way to work. Many held mobile telephones aloft to take pictures before moving on. One young man, not knowing which the crucial balcony was, photographed each of them in turn, even though the middle one was packed with a row of shrubs, three neat, leafy orbs, which barely left room for a human being.

A group of young girls had brought flowers, and were filmed handing them to the police, who as yet had not decided on a place for them, but laid them self- consciously in the back of the police van, aware of camera lenses following their every move.

The correspondents sent by twenty-four-hour news channels kept up a steady stream of comment and speculation around the few sensational facts they knew.

"…from her penthouse apartment at around two o'clock this morning. Police were alerted by the building's security guard…"

"…no sign yet that they are moving the body, which has led some to speculate…"

"…no word on whether she was alone when she fell…"

"…teams have entered the building and will be conducting a thorough search."

A chilly light filled the interior of the tent. Two men were crouching beside the body, ready to move it, at last, into a body bag. Her head had bled a little into the snow. The face was crushed and swollen, one eye reduced to a pucker, the other showing as a sliver of dull white between distended lids. When the sequined top she wore glittered in slight changes of light, it gave a disquieting impression of movement, as though she breathed again, or was tensing muscles, ready to rise. The snow fell with soft fingertip plunks on the canvas overhead.

"Where's the bloody ambulance?"

Detective Inspector Alastor Moody's temper was mounting. A paunchy man with a face the color of corned beef, whose shirts were usually ringed with sweat around the armpits, his short supply of patience, had been exhausted hours ago. He had been here nearly as long as the corpse; his feet were so cold that he could no longer feel them, and he was light-headed with hunger.

"Ambulance is two minutes away," said Detective Sergeant Gilderoy Lockhart, unintentionally answering his superior's question as he entered the tent with his mobile pressed to his ear. "Just been organizing a space for it."

Moody grunted. His bad temper was exacerbated by the conviction that Lockhart was excited by the presence of the photographers. Boyishly good-looking, with thick, wavy blond hair now frosted with snow, Lockhart had, in Moody's opinion, dawdled on their few forays outside the tent.

"At least that lot will shift once the body's gone," said Lockhart, still looking out at the photographers.

"They won't go while we're still treating the place like a fucking murder scene," snapped Moody.

Lockhart did not answer the unspoken challenge. Moody exploded anyway.

"The poor cow jumped. There was no one else there. Your so-called witness was coked out of her—"

"It's coming," said Lockhart, and to Moody's disgust, he slipped back out of the tent, to wait for the ambulance in full sight of the cameras.

The story forced news of politics, wars and disasters aside, and every version of it sparkled with pictures of the dead woman's flawless face, her lithe and sculpted body. Within hours, the few known facts had spread like a virus to millions: the public row with the famous boyfriend, the journey home alone, the overheard screaming and the final, fatal fall…

The boyfriend fled into a rehab facility, but the police remained inscrutable; those who had been with her on the evening before her death were hounded; thousands of columns of newsprint were filled, and hours of television news, and the woman who swore she had overheard a second argument moments before the body fell became briefly famous too, and was awarded smaller-sized photographs beside the images of the beautiful dead girl.

But then, to an almost audible groan of disappointment, the witness was proven to have lied, and _she_retreated into rehab, and the famous prime suspect emerged, as the man and the lady in a weather-house who can never be outside at the same time.

So it was suicide after all, and after a moment's stunned hiatus, the story gained a weak second wind. They wrote that she was unbalanced, unstable, unsuited to the superstardom her wildness and her beauty had snared; that she had moved among an immoral moneyed class that had corrupted her; that the decadence of her new life had unhinged an already fragile personality. She became a morality tale stiff with Schadenfreude, and so many columnists made allusion to Icarus that _Pr__i__v__ate __Ey__e_ran a special column.

And then, at last, the frenzy wore itself into staleness, and even the journalists had nothing left to say, but that too much had been said already.

Three Months Later

Part One

_Nam in omni ad__ve__rs__i__ta__t__e__for__t__unae__in__f__e__l__i__c__is__s__imum __e__st genus in__f__ortuni__i__, f__u__is__s__e felic__e__m._

For in every ill-turn of fortune

the most unhappy sort of unfortunate man is the one who has been happy.

Boethius, _De__Consolat__i__one__Philosophiae_

1

THOUGH HERMIONE GRANGER'S TWENTY-FIVE YEARS of life had seen their moments of drama and incident, she had never before woken up in the certain knowledge that she would remember the coming day for as long as she lived.

Shortly after midnight, her long-term boyfriend, Justin, had proposed to her under the statue of Eros in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. In the giddy relief following her acceptance, he confessed that he had been planning to pop the question in the Thai restaurant where they just had eaten dinner, but that he had reckoned without the silent couple beside them, who had eavesdropped on their entire conversation. He had therefore suggested a walk through the darkening streets, in spite of Hermione's protests that they both needed to be up early, and finally inspiration had seized him, and he had led her, bewildered, to the steps of the statue. There, flinging discretion to the chilly wind (in a most un-Justin- like way), he had proposed, on one knee, in front of three down-and-outs huddled on the steps, sharing what looked like a bottle of meths.

It had been, in Hermione's view, the most perfect proposal, ever, in the history of matrimony. He had even had a ring in his pocket, which she was now wearing; a sapphire with two diamonds, it fitted perfectly and all the way into town she kept staring at it on her hand as it rested on her lap. She and Justin had a story to tell now, a funny family story, the kind you told your children, in which his planning (she loved that he had planned it) went awry, and turned into something spontaneous. She loved the tramps, and the moon, and Justin, panicky and flustered, on one knee; she loved Eros, and dirty old Piccadilly, and the black cab they had taken home to Clap ham. She was, in fact, not far off loving the whole of London, which she had not so far warmed to, during the month she had lived there. Even the pale and pugnacious commuters squashed into the Tube carriage around her were gilded by the radiance of the ring, and as she emerged into the chilly March daylight at Totten ham Court Road underground station, she stroked the underside of the platinum band with her thumb, and experienced an explosion

of happiness at the thought that she might buy some bridal magazines at lunchtime.

Male eyes lingered on her as she picked her way through the road-works at the top of Oxford Street, consulting a piece of paper in her right hand. Hermione was, by any standards, a pretty girl; tall and curvaceous, with long bushy brown hair that rippled as she strode briskly along, the chill air adding color to her pale cheeks. This was the first day of a week-long secretarial assignment. She had been temping ever since coming to live with Justin in London, though not for much longer; she had what she termed "proper" interviews lined up now.

The most challenging part of these uninspiring piecemeal jobs was often finding the offices. London, after the small town in Yorkshire she had left, felt vast, complex and impenetrable. Justin had told her not to walk around with her nose in an _A__–Z__,_which would make her look like a tourist and render her vulnerable; she therefore relied, as often as not, on poorly hand-drawn maps that somebody at the temping agency had made for her. She was not convinced that this made her look more like a native-born Londoner.

The metal barricades and the blue plastic Corimec walls surrounding the road works made it much harder to see where she ought to be going, because they obscured half the landmarks drawn on the paper in her hand. She crossed the torn-up road in front of a towering office block, labeled "Center Point" on her map, which resembled a gigantic concrete waffle with its dense grid of uniform square windows, and made her way in the rough direction of Denmark Street.

She found it almost accidentally, following a narrow alleyway called Denmark Place out into a short street full of colorful shop fronts: windows full of guitars, keyboards and every kind of musical ephemera. Red and white barricades surrounded another open hole in the road, and workmen in fluorescent jackets greeted her with early-morning wolf-whistles, which Hermione pretended not to hear.

She consulted her watch. Having allowed her usual margin of time for getting lost, she was a quarter of an hour early. The nondescript black-painted doorway of the office she sought stood to the left of the 12 Bar Café; the name of the occupant of the office was written on a scrappy piece of lined paper taped beside the buzzer for the second floor. On an ordinary day, without the brand-new ring glittering upon her finger, she might have found this off-putting; today, however, the dirty paper and the peeling paint on the door were, like the tramps from last night, mere picturesque details on the backdrop of her grand romance. She checked her watch again (the sapphire glittered and her heart leapt; she would watch that stone glitter all the rest of her life), then decided, in a burst of euphoria, to go up early and show herself keen for a job that did not matter in the slightest.

She had just reached for the bell when the black door flew open from the inside, and a woman burst out on to the street. For one strangely static second the two of them looked directly into each other's eyes, as each braced to withstand a collision. Hermione's senses were unusually receptive on this enchanted morning; the split-second view of that white face made such an impression on her that she thought, moments later, when they had managed to dodge each other, missing contact by a centimeter, after the fair faced woman had hurried off down the street, around the corner and out of sight, that she could have drawn her perfectly from memory. It was not merely the extraordinary beauty of the face that had impressed itself on her memory, but the other's expression: livid, yet strangely exhilarated.

Hermione caught the door before it closed on the dingy stairwell. An old- fashioned metal staircase spiraled up around an equally antiquated birdcage lift. Concentrating on keeping her high heels from catching in the metalwork stairs, she proceeded to the first landing, passing a door carrying a laminated and framed poster saying _C__ro__w__dy__Graphics,_and continued climbing. It was only when she reached the glass door on the floor above that Hermione realized, for the first time, what kind of business she had been sent to assist. Nobody at the agency had said. The name on the paper beside the outside buzzer was engraved on the glass panel: _H. J. Potter, _and, underneath it, the words _Private__D__e__te__c__t__i__ve__._

Hermione stood quite still, with her mouth slightly open, experiencing a moment of wonder that nobody who knew her could have understood. She had never confided in a solitary human being (even Justin) her lifelong, secret, childish ambition. For this to happen today, of all days! It felt like a wink from God (and this too she somehow connected with the magic of the day; with Justin, and the ring; even though, properly considered, they had no connection at all).

Savoring the moment, she approached the engraved door very slowly. She stretched out her left hand (sapphire dark, now, in this dim light) towards the handle; but before she had touched it, the glass door too flew open.

This time, there was no near-miss. Sixteen unseeing stone of disheveled male slammed into her; Hermione was knocked off her feet and catapulted backwards, handbag flying, arms wind milling, towards the void beyond the lethal staircase.


	2. Chapter 2

2

HARRY ABSORBED THE IMPACT, HEARD the high-pitched scream and reacted instinctively: throwing out a long arm, he seized a fistful of cloth and flesh; a second shriek of pain echoed around the stone walls and then, with a wrench and a tussle, he had succeeded in dragging the girl back on to firm ground. Her shrieks were still echoing off the walls, and he realized that he himself had bellowed, "Jesus Christ!"

The girl was doubled up in pain against the office door, whimpering. Judging by the lopsided way she was hunched, with one hand buried deep under the lapel of her coat, Harry deduced that he had saved her by grabbing a substantial part of her left breast. A thick, wavy curtain of bushy brown hair hid most of the girl's blushing face, but Harry could see tears of pain leaking out of one uncovered eye.

"Fuck—sorry!" His loud voice reverberated around the stairwell. "I didn't see

You—didn't expect anyone to be there…"

From under their feet, the strange and solitary graphic designer who inhabited the office below yelled, "What's happening up there?" and a second later, a muffled complaint from above indicated that the manager of the bar downstairs, who slept in an attic flat over Harry's office, had also been disturbed—perhaps woken—by the noise.

"Come in here…"

Harry pushed open the door with his fingertips, so as to have no accidental contact with her while she stood huddled against it, and ushered her into the office.

"Is everything all right?" called the graphic designer querulously.

Harry slammed the office door behind him.

"I'm OK," lied Hermione, in a quavering voice, still hunched over with her hand on her chest, her back to him. After a second or two, she straightened up and turned around, her face scarlet and her eyes still wet.

Her accidental assailant was massive; his height, his general hairiness, coupled with a gently expanding belly, suggested a grizzly bear. One of his eyes was puffy and bruised the skin just below the eyebrow cut. Congealing blood sat in raised white-edged nail tracks on his left cheek and the right side of his thick neck, revealed by the crumpled open collar of his shirt.

"Are you M-Mr. Potter?" "Yeah."

"I-I'm the temp." "The what?"

"The temp. From Temporary Solutions?"

The name of the agency did not wipe the incredulous look from his battered face. They stared at each other, unnerved and antagonistic.

Just like Hermione, Harry Potter knew that he would forever remember the last twelve hours as an epoch-changing night in his life. Now, it seemed, the Fates had sent an emissary in a neat beige trench coat, to taunt him with the fact that his life was bubbling towards catastrophe. There was not supposed to be a temp. He had intended his dismissal of Hermione's predecessor to end his contract.

"How long have they sent you for?"

"A-a week to begin with," said Hermione, who had never been greeted with such a lack of enthusiasm.

Harry made a rapid mental calculation. A week at the agency's exorbitant rate would drive his overdraft yet further into the region of irreparable; it might even be the final straw his main creditor kept implying he was waiting for.

"'Scuse me a moment."

He left the room via the glass door, and turned immediately right, into a tiny dank toilet. Here he bolted the door, and stared into the cracked, spotted mirror over the sink.

The reflection staring back at him was not handsome. Harry had the high, bulging forehead, broad nose and thick brows of a young Beethoven who had taken to boxing, an impression only heightened by the swelling and blackening eye. His thick curly hair, springy as carpet, had ensured that his many youthful nicknames had included "Pubehead." He looked older than his thirty-five years.

Ramming the plug into the hole, he filled the cracked and grubby sink with cold water, took a deep breath and completely submerged his throbbing head. Displaced water slopped over his shoes, but he ignored it for the relief of ten seconds of icy, blind stillness.

Disparate images of the previous night flickered through his mind: emptying three drawers of possessions into a kitbag while Astoria screamed at him; the ashtray catching him on the brow-bone as he looked back at her from the door; the journey on foot across the dark city to his office, where he had slept for an hour or two in his desk chair. Then the final, filthy scene, after Astoria had tracked him down in the early hours, to plunge in those last few _band__e__ri__l__las_she had failed to implant before he had left her flat; his resolution to let her go when, after clawing his face, she had run out of the door; and then that moment of

madness when he had plunged after her—a pursuit ended as quickly as it had begun, with the unwitting intervention of this heedless, superfluous girl, whom he had been forced to save, and then placate.

He emerged from the cold water with a gasp and a grunt, his face and head pleasantly numb and tingling. With the cardboard-textured towel that hung on the back of the door he rubbed himself dry and stared again at his grim reflection. The scratches, washed clean of blood, looked like nothing more than the impressions of a crumpled pillow. Astoria would have reached the underground by now. One of the insane thoughts that had propelled him after her had been fear that she would throw herself on the tracks. Once, after a particularly vicious row in their mid-twenties, she had climbed on to a rooftop, where she had swayed drunkenly, vowing to jump. Perhaps he ought to be glad that the Temporary Solution had forced him to abandon the chase. There could be no going back from the scene in the early hours of this morning. This time, it had to be over.

Tugging his sodden collar away from his neck, Harry pulled back the rusty bolt and headed out of the toilet and back through the glass door.

A pneumatic drill had started up in the street outside. Hermione was standing in front of the desk with her back to the door; she whipped her hand back out of the front of her coat as he re-entered the room, and he knew that she had been massaging her breast again.

"Is—are you all right?" Harry asked, carefully not looking at the site of the

injury.

"I'm fine. Listen, if you don't need me, I'll go," said Hermione with dignity. "No—no, not at all," said a voice issuing from Harry's mouth, though he

listened to it with disgust. "A week—yeah, that'll be fine. Er—the post's here…" He scooped it from the doormat as he spoke and scattered it on the bare desk in front of her, a propitiatory offering. "Yeah, if you could open that, answer the phone, generally sort of tidy up—computer password's Hatherill23, I'll write it down…" This he did, under her wary, doubtful gaze. "There you go—I'll be in here."

He strode into the inner office, closed the door carefully behind him and then stood quite still, gazing at the kitbag under the bare desk. It contained everything he owned, for he doubted that he would ever see again the nine tenths of his possessions he had left at Astoria's. They would probably be gone by lunchtime; set on fire, dumped in the street, slashed and crushed, doused in bleach. The drill hammered relentlessly in the street below.

And now the impossibility of paying off his mountainous debts, the appalling consequences that would attend the imminent failure of this business, the looming, unknown but inevitably horrible sequel to his leaving Astoria; in

Harry's exhaustion, the misery of it all seemed to rear up in front of him in a kind

of kaleidoscope of horror.

Hardly aware that he had moved, he found himself back in the chair in which he had spent the latter part of the night. From the other side of the insubstantial partition wall came muffled sounds of movement. The Temporary Solution was no doubt starting up the computer, and would shortly discover that he had not received a single work-related email in three weeks. Then, at his own request, she would start opening all his final demands. Exhausted, sore and hungry, Harry slid face down on to the desk again, muffling his eyes and ears in his encircling arms, so that he did not have to listen while his humiliation was laid bare next door by a stranger.


	3. Chapter 3

3

FIVE MINUTES LATER THERE WAS a knock on the door and Harry, who had been on the verge of sleep, jerked upright in his chair.

"Sorry?"

His subconscious had become entangled with Astoria again; it was a surprise to see the strange girl enter the room. She had taken off her coat to reveal a snugly, even seductively fitting cream sweater. Harry addressed her hairline.

"Yeah?"

"There's a client here for you. Shall I show him in?" "There's a what?"

"A client, Mr. Potter."

He looked at her for several seconds, trying to process the information.

"Right, OK—no, give me a couple of minutes, please, Sandra, and then show

him in."

She withdrew without comment.

Harry wasted barely a second on asking himself why he had called her Sandra, before leaping to his feet and setting about looking and smelling less like a man who had slept in his clothes. Diving under his desk into his kitbag, he seized a tube of toothpaste, and squeezed three inches into his open mouth; then he noticed that his tie was soaked in water from the sink, and that his shirt front was spattered with flecks of blood, so he ripped both off, buttons pinging off the walls and filing cabinet, dragged a clean though heavily creased shirt out of the kitbag instead and pulled it on, thick fingers fumbling. After stuffing the kitbag out of sight behind his empty filing cabinet, he hastily reseated himself and checked the inner corners of his eyes for debris, all the while wondering whether this so- called client was the real thing, and whether he would be prepared to pay actual money for detective services. Harry had come to realize, over the course of an eighteen-month spiral into financial ruin, that neither of these things could be taken for granted. He was still chasing two clients for full payment of their bills; a third had refused to disburse a penny, because Harry's findings had not been to his taste, and given that he was sliding ever deeper into debt, and that a rent review of the area was threatening his tenancy of the central London office that he had been so pleased to secure, Harry was in no position to involve a lawyer. Rougher, cruder methods of debt collection had become a staple of his recent fantasies; it would have given him much pleasure to watch the smuggest of his defaulters cowering in the shadow of a baseball bat.

The door opened again; Harry hastily removed his index finger from his nostril and sat up straight, trying to look bright and alert in his chair.

"Mr. Potter, this is Mr. Weasley."

The prospective client followed Hermione into the room. The immediate impression was favorable. The stranger might be distinctly rabbity in appearance, with a short upper lip that failed to conceal large front teeth; his hair coloring was ginger, and his baby blue eyes, judging by the thickness of his glasses, myopic; but his dark gray suit were beautifully tailored, and the shining ice-blue tie, the watch and the shoes all looked expensive.

The snowy smoothness of the stranger's shirt made Harry doubly conscious of the thousand or so creases in his own clothes. He stood up to give Weasley the full benefit of his six feet three inches, held out a hairy-backed hand and attempted to counter his visitor's sartorial superiority by projecting the air of a man too busy to worry about laundry.

"Harry Potter; how d'you do."

"Ronald Weasley," said the other, shaking hands. His voice was pleasant, cultivated and uncertain. His gaze lingered on Harry's swollen eye.

"Could I offer you gentlemen some tea or coffee?" asked Hermione.

Weasley asked for a small black coffee, but Harry did not answer; he had just caught sight of a heavy-browed young woman in a frumpy tweed suit, who was sitting on the threadbare sofa beside the door of the outer office. It beggared belief that two potential clients could have arrived at the same moment. Surely he had not been sent a second temp?

"And you, Mr. Potter?" asked Hermione.

"What? Oh—black coffee, two sugars, please, Sandra," he said, before he could stop himself. He saw her mouth twist as she closed the door behind her, and only then did he remember that he did not have any coffee, sugar or, indeed, cups.

Sitting down at Harry's invitation, Weasley looked round the tatty office in what Harry was afraid was disappointment. The prospective client seemed nervous in the guilty way that Harry had come to associate with suspicious husbands, yet a faint air of authority clung to him, conveyed mainly by the obvious expense of his suit. Harry wondered how Weasley had found him. It was hard to get word-of-mouth business when your only client (as she regularly sobbed down the telephone) had no friends.

"What can I do for you, Mr. Weasley?" he asked, back in his own chair.

"It's—um—actually, I wonder whether I could just check…I think we've met before."

"Really?"

"You wouldn't remember me, it was years and years ago…but I think you were friends with my brother Charlie. Charlie Weasley? He died—in an accident—when he was nine."

"Bloody hell," said Harry. "Charlie…yeah, I remember."

And, indeed, he remembered perfectly. Charlie Weasley had been one of many friends Harry had collected during a complicated, peripatetic childhood. A magnetic, wild and reckless boy, pack leader of the coolest gang at Harry's new school in London, Charlie had taken one look at the enormous new boy with the thick Welsh accent, and appointed him his best friend and lieutenant. Two giddy months of bosom friendship and bad behavior had followed. Harry, who had always been fascinated by the smooth workings of other children's homes, with their sane, well-ordered families, and the bedrooms they were allowed to keep for years and years, retained a vivid memory of Charlie's house, which had been large and luxurious. There had been a long sunlit lawn, a tree house, and iced lemon squash served by Charlie's mother.

And then had come the unprecedented horror of the first day back at school after Easter break, when their form teacher had told them that Charlie would never return, that he was dead, that he had ridden his bike over the edge of a quarry, while holidaying in Wales. She had been a mean old bitch, that teacher, and she had not been able to resist telling the class that Charlie, who as they would remember _of__t__e__n__disob__eye__d__gro__wn__-__ups,_had been _ex__pressly__forb__i__dd__e__n_to ride anywhere near the quarry, but that he had done so anyway, _p__e__rhaps__ s__how__i__n__g of__f_—but she had been forced to stop there, because two little girls in the front row were sobbing.

From that day onwards, Harry had seen the face of a laughing red haired boy fragmenting every time he looked at, or imagined a quarry. He would not have been surprised if every member of Charlie Weasley's old class had been left with the same lingering fear of the great dark pit, the sheer drop and the unforgiving stone.

"Yeah, I remember Charlie," he said. Weasley's Adam's apple bobbed a little.

"Yes. Well it's your name, you see. I remember so clearly Charlie talking about you, on holiday, in the days before he died; 'my friend Harry,' 'Harry Potter.' It's unusual, isn't it? Where does 'Harry' come from, do you know? I've never met it anywhere else."

Weasley was not the first person Harry had known who would snatch at any procrastinatory subject—the weather, the congestion charge, their preferences in hot drinks—to postpone discussion of what had brought them to his office.

"I've been told it's something to do with Prince William," he said

"Really, is it? Nothing to do with hitting, or walkouts, ha ha…no Well you

see, when I was looking for someone to help me with this business, and I saw

your name in the book," Weasley's knee began jiggling up and down, "you can perhaps imagine how it—well, it felt like—like a sign. A sign from Charlie. Saying I was right."

His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed.

"OK," said Harry cautiously, hoping that he had not been mistaken for a

medium.

"It's my sister, you see," said Weasley. "Right. Is she in some kind of trouble?" "She's dead."

Harry just stopped himself saying, "What, her too?" "I'm sorry," he said carefully.

Weasley acknowledged the condolence with a jerky inclination of the head.

"I—this isn't easy. Firstly, you should know that my sister is—was—Ginevra Weasley."

Hope, so briefly re-erected at the news that he might have a client, fell slowly forwards like a granite tombstone and landed with an agonizing blow in Harry's gut. The man sitting opposite him was delusional, if not actually unhinged. It was impossibility akin to two identical snowflakes that this whey-faced, leporine man could have sprung from the same genetic pool as the bronze-skinned, colt- limbed, diamond-cut beauty that had been Ginny Weasley.

"My parents adopted her," said Weasley meekly, as though he knew what

Harry was thinking. "We were all adopted."

"Uh huh," said Harry. He had an exceptionally accurate memory; thinking back to that huge, cool, well-ordered house, and the blazing acres of garden, he remembered a languid blonde mother presiding at the picnic table, the distant booming voice of an intimidating father; a surly older brother picking at the fruit cake, Charlie himself making his mother laugh as he clowned; but no little girl.

"You wouldn't have met Ginny," Weasley went on, again as though Harry had spoken his thoughts aloud. "My parents didn't adopt her until after Charlie had died. She was four years old when she came to us; she'd been in care for a couple of years. I was nearly fifteen. I can still remember standing at the front door and

watching my father carrying her up the drive. She was wearing a little red knitted

hat. My mother's still got it."

And suddenly, shockingly, Ronald Weasley burst into tears. He sobbed into his hands, hunch-shouldered, quaking, while tears and snot slid through the cracks in his fingers. Every time he seemed to have himself under some kind of control, more sobs burst forth.

"I'm sorry—sorry—Jesus…"

Panting and hiccoughing, he dabbed beneath his glasses with a wadded handkerchief, trying to regain control.

The office door opened and Hermione backed in, carrying a tray. Weasley turned his face away, his shoulders heaving and shaking. Through the open door Harry caught another glimpse of the besuited woman in the outer office; she was now scowling at him from over the top of a copy of the _Daily __Ex__press._

Hermione laid out two cups, a milk jug, a sugar bowl and a plate of chocolate biscuits, none of which Harry had ever seen before, smiled in perfunctory fashion at his thanks and made to leave.

"Hang on a moment, Sandra," said Harry. "Could you…?"

He took a piece of paper from his desk and slid it on to his knee. While Weasley made soft gulping noises, Harry wrote, very swiftly and as legibly as he could manage:

_Please__google__Ginny__Weasley__and__f__i__nd__out__w__h__e__ther__she__was__adopted,__and__if__so, by whom. Do not__discuss__what__y__ou__are doing__wi__t__h__the woman outs__i__de__(__what__i__s she__doing__h__e__r__e__?__)__.__W__ri__t__e__down__the__ans__w__e__rs__to__q__u__e__st__i__ons__abo__v__e__and__bring__them to me__h__e__r__e__, w__i__thout__saying what__y__ou'__v__e__found._

He handed the piece of paper to Hermione, who took it wordlessly and left the room.

"Sorry—I'm so sorry," Weasley gasped, when the door had closed. "This is— I'm not usually—I've been back at work, seeing clients…" He took several deep breaths. With his pink eyes the resemblance to an albino rabbit was heightened. His right knee was still jiggling up and down.

"It's just been a dreadful time," he whispered, taking deep breaths. "Ginny…and my mother's dying…"

Harry's mouth was watering at the sight of the chocolate biscuits, because he had eaten nothing for what felt like days; but he felt it would harry an unsympathetic note to start snacking while Weasley jiggled and sniffed and mopped his eyes. The pneumatic drill was still hammering like a machine gun down in the street.

"She's given up completely since Ginny died. It's broken her. Her cancer was supposed to be in remission, but it's come back, and they say there's nothing more they can do. I mean, this is the second time. She had a sort of breakdown after Charlie. My father thought another child would make it better. They'd always wanted a girl. It wasn't easy for them to be approved, but Ginny was mixed race, and harder to place, so," he finished, on a strangled sob, "they managed to get her.

"She was always b-beautiful. She was d-discovered in Oxford Street, out shopping with my mother. Taken on by Athena. It's one of the most prestigious agencies. She was modeling f-full time by seventeen. By the time she died, she was worth around ten million. I don't know why I'm telling you all this. You probably know it all. Everyone knew—thought they knew—all about Ginny."

He picked up his cup clumsily; his hands were trembling so much that coffee slopped over the edge on to his sharply pressed suit trousers.

"What exactly is it that you would like me to do for you?" Harry asked.

Weasley replaced the cup shakily on the desk, then gripped his hands together tightly.

"They say my sister killed herself. I don't believe it."

Harry remembered the television pictures: the black body bag on a stretcher, flickering in a storm of camera flashes as it was loaded into an ambulance, the photographers clustering around as it started to move, holding up their cameras to the dark windows, white lights bouncing off the black glass. He knew more about the death of Ginny Weasley than he had ever meant or wanted to know; the same would be true of virtually any sentient being in Britain. Bombarded with the story, you grew interested against your will, and before you knew it, you were so well informed, so opinionated about the facts of the case; you would have been unfit to sit on a jury.

"There was an inquest, wasn't there?"

"Yes, but the detective in charge of the case was convinced from the outset that it was suicide, purely because Ginny was on lithium. The things he overlooked—they've even spotted some of them on the internet."

Weasley jabbed a nonsensical finger at Harry's bare desktop, where a computer

might have been expected to stand.

A perfunctory knock and the door opened; Hermione strode in, handed Harry a folded note and withdrew.

"Sorry, d'you mind?" said Harry. "I've been waiting for this message."

He unfolded the note against his knee, so that Weasley could not see through the back, and read:

_Ginny__Weasley__ was__adopt__e__d__by__Sir__Arthur__and__L__ady __Molly __Weasley__wh__e__n__she was four.__She__grew__up__as__Ginny__Weasley__but took__h__e__r moth__e__r's__maid__e__n__name__wh__e__n she__sta__r__ted__mod__e__l__i__ng.__S__h__e__has__an__older__b__rother__c__al__l__e__d__Ronald__,__who is__a la__wye__r. __T__he girl__w__a__i__t__ing__outside__i__s__M__r.__Weasley's__g__i__rl__f__rie__n__d__and__a__s__ec__r__e__tary__at__his__f__irm. __T__h__e__y__work__for__Weasley__, __Dumbledore__, Diggle ,__the__f__i__rm__sta__r__ted__by__ Ginny__and__Ronald__'s mat__e__rnal__grandfather.__T__he__photograph__of__Ronald__Weasley__on__L__M__P__'__s__home__page is __i__d__e__nt__i__c__al __t__o the __m__an __y__ou're__ta__l__k__ing __t__o._

Harry crumpled the note and dropped it into the waste-paper basket at his feet. He was staggered. Ronald Weasley was not a fantasist; and he, Harry, appeared to have been sent a temp with more initiative, and better punctuation, than any he had ever met.

"Sorry, go on," he said to Weasley. "You were saying—about the inquest?"

"Yeah", dabbing the end of his nose with his wet handkerchief. "Well, I'm not denying that Ginny had problems. She put Mum through hell, as a matter of fact. It started around the same time our father died—you probably know all this, God knows there was enough about it in the press…but she was expelled from school for dabbling in drugs; she ran off to London, Mum found her living rough with addicts; the drugs exacerbated the mental problems; she absconded from a treatment center—there were endless scenes and dramas. In the end, though, they realized she had bipolar disorder and put her on the right medication, and ever since then, as long as she was taking her tablets, she was fine; you'd never have known there was anything wrong with her. Even the coroner accepted that she _had _been taking her medication, the autopsy proved it.

"But the police and the coroner couldn't see past the girl who had a history of poor mental health. They insisted that she was depressed, but I can tell you myself that Ginny wasn't depressed at all. I saw her on the morning before she died, and she was absolutely fine. Things were going very well for her, particularly career-wise. She'd just signed a contract that would have brought in five million over two years; she asked me to look over it for her, and it was a bloody good deal. The designer was a great friend of hers, Malfoy, I expect you've heard of him? And she was booked solid for months; there was a shoot in Morocco coming up, and she loved the traveling. So you see, there was no reason whatsoever for her to take her own life."

Harry nodded politely, inwardly unimpressed. Suicides, in his experience, were perfectly capable of feigning an interest in a future they had no intention of inhabiting. Weasley's rosy, golden-hued morning mood might easily have turned dark and hopeless in the day and half a night that had preceded her death; he had known it happen. He remembered the lieutenant in the King's Royal Rifle Corps who had risen in the night after his own birthday party, of which, by all accounts; he had been the life and soul. He had penned his family a note, telling them to call the police and not go into the garage. The body had been found hanging from the garage ceiling by his fifteen-year-old son, who had not noticed the note as he hurried through the kitchen on the way to fetch his bicycle.

"That's not all," said Weasley. "There's evidence, hard evidence. Hannah Longbottom's, for a start."

"She was the neighbor who said she heard an argument upstairs?"

"Exactly! She heard a man shouting up there, right before Ginny went over the balcony! The police rubbished her evidence, purely because—well, she'd taken cocaine. But that doesn't mean she didn't know what she'd heard. Hannah maintains to this day that Ginny was arguing with a man seconds before she fell. I know, because I've discussed it with her very recently. Our firm is handling her divorce. I'm sure I'd be able to persuade her to talk to you.

"And then," said Weasley, watching Harry anxiously, trying to gauge his reaction, "there was the CCTV footage. A man walking towards Kentigern Gardens about twenty minutes before Ginny fell, and then footage of the same man running hell for leather away from Kentigern Gardens after she'd been killed. They never found out who he was; never managed to trace him."

With a kind of furtive eagerness, Weasley now drew from an inside pocket of his jacket a slightly crumpled clean envelope and held it out.

"I've written it all down. The timings and everything. It's all in here. You'll see how it fits together."

The appearance of the envelope did nothing to increase Harry's confidence in Weasley's judgment. He had been handed such things before: the scribbled fruits of lonely and misguided obsessions; one-track maunderings on pet theories; complex timetables twisted to fit fantastic contingencies. The lawyer's left eyelid was flickering, one of his knees was jerking up and down and the fingers proffering the envelope were trembling.

For a few seconds Harry weighed these signs of strain against Weasley's undoubtedly hand-made shoes, and the Vacheron Constantin watch revealed on his pale wrist when he gesticulated. This was a man who could and would pay; perhaps long enough to enable Harry to clear one installment of the loan that was the most pressing of his debts. With a sigh, and an inner scowl at his own conscience, Harry said:

With a kind of furtive eagerness, Weasley now drew from an inside pocket of his jacket a slightly crumpled clean envelope and held it out.

"I've written it all down. The timings and everything. It's all in here. You'll see how it fits together."

The appearance of the envelope did nothing to increase Harry's confidence in Weasley's judgment. He had been handed such things before: the scribbled fruits of lonely and misguided obsessions; one-track maunderings on pet theories; complex timetables twisted to fit fantastic contingencies. The lawyer's left eyelid was flickering, one of his knees was jerking up and down and the fingers proffering the envelope were trembling.

For a few seconds Harry weighed these signs of strain against Weasley's undoubtedly hand-made shoes, and the Vacheron Constantin watch revealed on his pale wrist when he gesticulated. This was a man who could and would pay; perhaps long enough to enable Harry to clear one installment of the loan that was the most pressing of his debts. With a sigh, and an inner scowl at his own conscience, Harry said:

"Mr. Weasley-"

"Call me Ronald."

"Ronald…I'm going to be honest with you. I don't think it would be right to take your money."

Red blotches blossomed on Weasley's pale neck, and on the undistinguished

face, as he continued to hold out the envelope.

"What do you mean, it wouldn't be right?"

"Your sister's death was probably as thoroughly investigated as anything can be. Millions of people, and media from all over the world, were following the police's every move. They would have been twice as thorough as usual. Suicide is a difficult thing to have to accept—"

"I don't accept it. I'll never accept it. She didn't kill herself. Someone pushed her over that balcony."

The drill outside stopped suddenly, so that Weasley's voice rang loudly through the room; and his hair-trigger fury was that of a meek man pushed to his absolute limit.

"I see. I get it. You're another one, are you? Another fucking armchair psychologist? Charlie's dead, my father's dead, Ginny's dead and my mother's dying—I've lost everyone, and I need a bereavement counselor, not a detective. D'you think I haven't heard it about a hundred fucking times before?"

Weasley stood up, impressive for all his rabbity teeth and blotchy skin.

"I'm a pretty rich man, Harry. Sorry to be crass about it, but there you are. My father left me a sizeable trust fund. I've looked into the going rate for this kind of thing, and I would have been happy to pay you double."

A double fee. Harry's conscience, once firm and inelastic, had been weakened by repeated blows of fate; this was the knockout punch. His baser self was already gamboling off into the realms of happy speculation: a month's work would give him enough to pay off the temp and some of the rent arrears; two months, the more pressing debts…three months, a chunk of the overdraft gone…four months…

But Ronald Weasley was speaking over his shoulder as he moved towards the door, clutching and crumpling the envelope that Harry had refused to take.

"I wanted it to be you because of Charlie, but I found out a bit about you, I'm not a complete bloody idiot. Special investigation branch, military police, wasn't it? Decorated as well. I can't say I was impressed by your offices," Weasley was almost shouting now, and Harry was aware that the muffled female voices in the outer office had fallen silent, "but apparently I was wrong, and you can afford to turn down work. Fine! Bloody forget it. I'm sure I'll find somebody else to do the job. Sorry to have troubled you!"


	4. Chapter 4

4

THE MEN'S CONVERSATION HAD BEEN carrying, with increasing clarity, through the flimsy dividing wall for a couple of minutes; now, in the sudden silence following the cessation of the drill, Weasley's words were plainly audible.

Purely for her own amusement, in the high spirits of this happy day, Hermione had been trying to act convincingly the part of Harry regular secretary, and not to give away to Weasley's girlfriend that she had only been working for a private detective for half an hour. She concealed as best she could any sign of surprise or excitement at the outbreak of shouting, but she was instinctively on Weasley's side, whatever the cause of the conflict. Harry's job and his black eye had a certain beaten-up glamour, but his attitude towards her was deplorable, and her left breast was still sore.

Weasley's girlfriend had been staring at the closed door ever since the men's voices had first become audible over the noise of the drill. Thick-set and very dark, with a limp bob and what might have been a monobrow if she had not plucked it, she looked naturally cross. Hermione had often noticed how couples tended to be of roughly equivalent personal attractiveness, though of course factors such as money often seemed to secure a partner of significantly better looks than oneself. Hermione found it endearing that Weasley, who on the evidence of his smart suit and his prestigious firm could have set his sights on somebody much prettier, had chosen this girl, who she assumed was warmer and kinder than her appearance suggested.

"Are you sure you wouldn't like a coffee, Lavender?" she asked.

The girl looked around as though surprised at being spoken to, as though she had forgotten that Hermione was there.

"No thanks," she said, in a deep voice that was surprisingly melodious. "I knew he'd get upset," she added, with an odd kind of satisfaction. "I've tried to talk him out of doing this, but he wouldn't listen. Sounds like this so-called detective is turning him down. Good for him."

Hermione's surprise must have shown, because Lavender went on, with a trace of impatience:

"It'd be better for Ronald if he'd just accept the facts. She killed herself. The rest of the family have come to terms with it, I don't know why he can't."

There was no point pretending that she did not know what the woman was talking about. Everyone knew what had happened to Ginny Weasley. Hermione could remember exactly where she had been when she had heard that the model had dived to her death on a sub-zero night in January: standing at the sink in the kitchen of her parents' house. The news had come over the radio, and she had emitted a little cry of surprise, and run out of the kitchen in her nightshirt to tell

Justin, who was staying for the weekend. How could the death of someone you had never met affect you so? Hermione had greatly admired Ginny Weasley's looks. She did not much like her own milkmaid's coloring: the model had been fair, luminous, fine-boned and fierce.

"It hasn't been very long since she died."

"Three months," said Lavender, shaking out her _Daily__E__x__press._"Is he any good, this man?"

Hermione had noticed Lavender's contemptuous expression as she took in the dilapidated condition, and undeniable grubbiness, of the little waiting room, and she had just seen, online, the pristine, palatial office where the other woman worked. Her answer was therefore prompted by self-respect rather than any desire to protect Harry.

"Oh yes," she replied coolly. "He's one of the best."

She slit open a pink, kitten-embellished envelope with the air of a woman who daily dealt with exigencies much more complex and intriguing than Lavender could possibly imagine.

Meanwhile, Harry and Weasley were facing each other across the inner room, the one furious, the other trying to find a way to reverse his position without jettisoning his self-respect.

"All I want, Harry," said Weasley hoarsely, the color high in his thin face, "is

_jus__t__ic__e__."_

He might have struck a divine tuning fork; the word rang through the shabby office, calling forth an inaudible but plangent note in Harry's breast. Weasley had located the pilot light Harry shielded when everything else had been blown to ashes. He stood in desperate need of money, but Weasley had given him another, better reason to jettison his scruples.

"OK. I understand. I mean it, Ronald; I understand. Come back and sit down. If you still want my help, I'd like to give it."

Weasley glared at him. There was no noise in the office but the distant shouts of the workmen below.

"Would you like your—er, wife, is she?—to come in?"

"No," said Weasley, still tense, with his hand on the doorknob. "Lavender doesn't think I ought to be doing this. I don't know why she wanted to come along, actually. Probably hoping you'd turn me down."

"Please—sit down. Let's go over this properly."

Weasley hesitated, and then moved back towards his abandoned chair.

His self-restraint crumbling at last, Harry took a chocolate biscuit and crammed it, whole, into his mouth; he took an unused notepad from his desk drawer, flicked it open, reached for a pen and managed to swallow the biscuit in the time it took Weasley to resume his seat.

"Shall I take that?" he suggested, pointing to the envelope Weasley was still

clutching.

The lawyer handed it over as though unsure he could trust Harry with it. Harry, who did not wish to to peruse the contents in front of Weasley, put it aside with a small pat, which was intended to show that it was now a valued component of the investigation, and readied his pen.

"Ronald, if you could give me a brief outline of what happened on the day your sister died, it would be very helpful."

By nature methodical and thorough, Harry had been trained to investigate to a high and rigorous standard. First, allow the witness to tell their story in their own way: the untrammeled flow often revealed details, apparent inconsequentialities that would later prove invaluable nuggets of evidence. Once the first gush of impression and recollection had been harvested, then it was time to solicit and arrange facts rigorously and precisely: _p__e__ople, pl__a__ce__s, propert__y_…

"Oh," said Weasley, who seemed, after all his vehemence, unsure where to

start, "I don't really…let's see…"

"When was the last time you saw her?" Harry prompted.

"That would have been—yes, the morning before she died. We…we had an argument, as a matter of fact, though thank God we made it up."

"What time was this?"

"It was early. Before nine, I was on my way in to the office. Perhaps a quarter to nine?"

"And what did you argue about?"

"Oh, about her boyfriend, Michael Corner. They'd just got back together again. The family had thought it was over and we'd been so pleased. He's a horrible person, an addict and a chronic self-publicist; about the worst influence on Ginny you could imagine.

"I might have been a bit heavy-handed, I—I see that now. I was eleven years older than Ginny. I felt protective of her, you know. Perhaps I was bossy at times. She was always telling me that I didn't understand."

"Understand what?"

"Well…anything. She had lots of issues. Issues with being adopted. Issues with being freckled and albino in a white family. She used to say I had it easy…I don't know. Perhaps she was right."

He blinked rapidly behind his glasses. "The row was really the continuation of a row we'd had on the telephone the night before. I just couldn't believe she'd been so stupid as to go back to Corner. The relief we all felt when they split up…I mean, given her own history with drugs, hooking up with an addict…" He drew breath. "She didn't want to hear it. She never did. She was furious with me. She'd actually given instructions to the security man at the flats not to let me past the front desk next morning, but—well, Tom waved me through anyway."

Humiliating, thought Harry, to have to rely on the pity of doormen.

"I wouldn't have gone up," said Weasley miserably, blotches of color dappling his thin neck again, "but I had the contract with Malfoy to give back to her; she'd asked me to look over it and she needed to sign it…She could be quite blasé about things like that. Anyway, she wasn't too happy that they'd let me upstairs, and we rowed again, but it burned itself out quite quickly. She calmed down.

"So then I told her that Mum would appreciate a visit. Mum had just got out of hospital, you see. She'd had a hysterectomy. Ginny said she might pop in and see her later, at her flat, but that she couldn't be sure. She had things on."

Weasley took a deep breath; his right knee started jiggling up and down again and his knobble-knuckled hands washed each other in dumb show.

"I don't want you to think badly of her. People thought her selfish, but she'd been the youngest in the family and rather indulged, and then she was ill and, naturally, the center of attention, and then she was plunged into this extraordinary life where things, people, revolved around her, and she was pursued everywhere by the paparazzi. It wasn't a normal existence."

"No," said Harry.

"So, anyway, I told Ginny how groggy and sore Mum was feeling, and she said she might look in on her later. I left; I nipped into my office to get some files from Lavender, because I wanted to work from Mum's flat that day and keep her company. I next saw Ginny at Mum's, mid-morning. She sat with Mum for a while in the bedroom until my uncle arrived to visit, and then nipped into the study where I was working, to say goodbye. She hugged me before she…"

Weasley's voice cracked, and he stared down into his lap.

"More coffee?" Harry suggested. Weasley shook his bowed head. To give him a moment to pull himself together, Harry picked up the tray and headed for the outer office.

Weasley's girlfriend looked up from her newspaper, scowling, when Harry

appeared. "Aren't you finished?" she asked.

"Evidently not," said Harry, with no attempt at a smile. She glared at him

while he addressed Hermione.

"Could I get another cup of coffee, er…?"

Hermione stood up and took the tray from him in silence.

"Ronald needs to be back in the office at half past ten," Lavender informed Harry, in a slightly louder voice. "We'll need to be off in ten minutes at the most."

"I'll bear that in mind," Harry assured her blandly, before returning to the inner office, where Weasley was sitting as though in prayer, his head bowed over his clasped hands.

"I'm sorry," he muttered, as Harry sat back down. "It's still difficult talking about it."

"No problem," said Harry, picking up his notebook again. "So Ginny came to

see your mother? What time was that?"

"Elevenish. It all came out at the inquest, what she did after that. She got her driver to take her to some boutique that she liked, and then she went back to her flat. She had an appointment at home with a makeup artist she knew, and her friend Daphne Greengrass joined her there. You'll have seen Daphne Greengrass, she's a model. Very blonde. They were photographed together as angels, you probably saw it: naked except for handbags and wings. Malfoy used the picture in his advertising campaign after Ginny died. People said it was tasteless.

"So Ginny and Daphne spent the afternoon together at Ginny's flat, and then they left to go out to dinner, where they met up with Corner and some other people. The whole group went on to Uzi, the nightclub, and they were there until past midnight.

"Then Corner and Ginny argued. Lots of people saw it happen. He manhandled her a bit, tried to make her stay, but she left the club alone. Everyone thought he'd done it, afterwards, but he turned out to have a cast-iron alibi."

"Cleared on the evidence of his drug dealer, wasn't he?" asked Harry, still

writing.

"Yes, exactly. So—so Ginny arrived back at her flat around twenty past one. She was photographed going inside. You probably remember that picture. It was everywhere afterwards."

Harry remembered: one of the world's most photographed women, head bowed, shoulders hunched, eyes heavy and arms folded tightly around her torso, twisting her face away from the photographers. Once the verdict of suicide had been clearly established, it had taken on a macabre aspect: the rich and beautiful young woman, less than an hour from her death, attempting to conceal her wretchedness from the lenses she had courted, and which had so adored her.

"Were there usually photographers outside her door?"

"Yes, especially if they knew she was with Corner, or they wanted to get a shot of her coming home drunk. But they weren't only there for her that night. An American rapper was supposed to be arriving to stay in the same building that evening; Dean Thomas is his name. His record company had rented the apartment beneath hers. In the event he never stayed there, because with the police all over the building it was easier for him to go to a hotel. But the photographers who had chased Ginny's car when she left Uzi joined the ones who were waiting for Thomas outside the flats, so that made quite a crowd of them around the entrance of the building, though they all drifted away not long after she'd gone inside. Somehow they got a tip-off that Thomas wouldn't be there for hours.

"It was a bitterly cold night. Snowing. Below freezing. So the street was empty when she fell."

Weasley blinked and took another sip of cold coffee, and Harry thought about the paparazzi who had left before Ginny Weasley fell from her balcony. Imagine, he thought, what a shot of Weasley diving to her death would have gone for; enough to retire on, perhaps.

"Ronald, your girlfriend says you need to be somewhere at half past ten." "What?"

Weasley seemed to return to himself. He checked the expensive watch and gasped.

"Good God, I had no idea I'd been here so long. What—what happens now?"

he asked, looking slightly bewildered. "You'll read my notes?"

"Yeah, of course," Harry assured him, "and I'll call you in a couple of days when I've done some preliminary work. I expect I'll have a lot more questions then."

"All right," said Weasley, getting dazedly to his feet. "Here—take my card.

And how would you like me to pay?"

"A month's fee in advance will be great," said Harry. Quashing feeble stirrings of shame, and remembering that Weasley himself had offered a double fee, he named an exorbitant amount, and to his delight Weasley did not quibble, nor ask whether he accepted credit cards nor even promise to drop the money in later, but drew out a real check-book and a pen.

"If, say, a quarter of it could be in cash," Harry added, chancing his luck; and was staggered for the second time that morning when Weasley said, "I did wonder whether you'd prefer…" and counted out a pile of fifties in addition to the check.

They emerged into the outer office at the very moment that Hermione was about to enter with Harry's fresh coffee. Weasley's girlfriend stood up when the door opened, and folded her newspaper with the air of one who had been kept waiting too long. She was almost as tall as Weasley, large-framed, with a surly expression and big, mannish hands.

"So you've agreed to do it, have you?" she asked Harry. He had the impression that she thought he was taking advantage of her rich boyfriend. Very possibly she was right.

"Yes, Ronald's hired me," he replied.

"Oh well," she said, ungraciously. "You're pleased, I expect, Ronald."

The lawyer smiled at her, and she sighed and patted his arm, like a tolerant but slightly exasperated mother to a child. Ronald Weasley raised his hand in a salute, then followed his girlfriend out of the room, and their footsteps clanged away down the metal stairs.


	5. Chapter 5

5

POTTER TURNED TO HERMIONE WHO had sat back down at the computer. His coffee was sitting beside the piles of neatly sorted mail lined up on the desk beside her.

"Thanks," he said, taking a sip, "and for the note. Why are you a temp?" "What d'you mean?" she asked, looking suspicious.

"You can spell and punctuate. You catch on quick. You show initiative—

where did the cups and the tray come from? The coffee and biscuits?"

"I borrowed them all from Mr. Crowdy. I told him we'd return them by lunchtime."

"Mr. who?"

Mr. Crowdy, the man downstairs. The graphic designer." "And he just let you have them?"

"Yes," she said, a little defensively. "I thought, having offered the client coffee, we ought to provide it."

Her use of the plural pronoun was like a gentle pat to his morale.

"Well, that was efficiency way beyond anything Temporary Solutions has sent here before, take it from me. Sorry I kept calling you Sandra; she was the last girl. What's your real name?"

"Hermione."

"Hermione" he repeated. "That'll be easy to remember."

He had some notion of making a jocular allusion to Shakespeare loving parents, but the feeble jest died on his lips as her face turned brilliantly pink. Too late, he realized that the most unfortunate construction could be put on his innocent words. Hermione swung the swivel chair back towards the computer monitor, so that all Potter could see was an edge of a flaming cheek. In one frozen moment of mutual mortification, the room seemed to have shrunk to the size of a telephone kiosk.

"I'm going to nip out for a bit," said Potter, putting down his virtually untouched coffee and moving crabwise towards the door, taking down the overcoat hanging beside it. "If anyone calls…"

"Mr. Potter—before you go, I think you ought to see this."

Still flushed, Hermione took, from on top of the pile of opened letters beside her computer, a sheet of bright pink writing paper and a matching envelope, both of

which she had put into a clear plastic pocket. Potter noticed her engagement ring as she held the things up.

"It's a death threat," she said.

"Oh yeah," said Potter. "Nothing to worry about. They come in about once a week."

"But—"

"It's a disgruntled ex-client. Bit unhinged. He thinks he's throwing me off the

scent by using that paper."

"Surely, though—shouldn't the police see it?" "Give them a laugh, you mean?"

"It isn't funny, it's a death threat!" she said, and Potter realized why she had

placed it, with its envelope, in the plastic pocket. He was mildly touched.

"Just file it with the others," he said, pointing towards the filing cabinets in the corner. "If he was going to kill me he'd have made his move before now. You'll find six months' worth of letters in there somewhere. Will you be all right to hold the fort for a bit while I'm out?"

"I'll cope," she said, and he was amused by the sour note in her voice, and her obvious disappointment that nobody was going to fingerprint the be-kittened death threat.

"If you need me, my mobile number's on the cards in the top drawer." "Fine," she said, looking at neither the drawer nor him.

"If you want to go out for lunch, feel free. There's a spare key in the desk somewhere."

"OK."

"See you later, then."

He paused just outside the glass door, on the threshold of the tiny dank bathroom. The pressure in his guts was becoming painful, but he felt that her efficiency, and her impersonal concern for his safety, entitled her to some consideration. Resolving to wait until he reached the pub, Potter headed down the stairs.

Out in the street, he lit a cigarette, turned left and proceeded past the closed 12

Bar Café, up the narrow walkway of Denmark Place past a window full of multicolored guitars, and walls covered in fluttering fliers, away from the relentless pounding of the pneumatic drill. Skirting the rubble and wreckage of

the street at the foot of Center Point, he marched past a gigantic gold statue of Freddie Mercury that stood over the entrance of the Dominion Theatre across the road, head bowed, one fist raised in the air, like some pagan god of chaos.

The ornate Victorian face of the Tottenham pub rose up behind the rubble and roadworks, and Potter, pleasurably aware of the large amount of cash in his pocket, pushed his way through its doors, into a serene Victorian atmosphere of gleaming scrolled dark wood and brass fittings. Its frosted glass half-partitions, its aged leather banquettes, its bar mirrors covered in gilt, cherubs and horns of plenty spoke of a confident and ordered world that was in satisfying contrast to the ruined street. Potter ordered a pint of Doom Bar and took it to the back of the almost deserted pub, where he placed his glass on a high circular table, under the garish glass cupola in the ceiling, and headed straight into the Gents, which smelled strongly of piss.

Ten minutes later, and feeling considerably more comfortable, Potter was a third of the way into his pint, which was deepening the anesthetic effect of his exhaustion. The Cornish beer tasted of home, peace and long-gone security. There was a large and blurry painting of a Victorian maiden, dancing with roses in her hands, directly opposite him. Frolicking coyly as she gazed at him through a shower of petals, her enormous breasts draped in white, she was as unlike a real woman as the table on which his pint rested, or the obese man with the ponytail who was working the pumps at the bar.

And now Potter's thoughts swarmed back to Astoria, who was indubitably real; beautiful, dangerous as a cornered vixen, clever, sometimes funny, and, in the words of Potter's very oldest friend, "fucked to the core." Was it over, really over, this time? Cocooned in his tiredness, Potter recalled the scenes of last night and this morning. Finally she had done something he could not forgive, and the pain would, no doubt be excruciating once the anesthetic wore off: but in the meantime, there were certain practicalities to be faced. It had been Astoria's flat that they had been living in; her stylish, expensive maisonette in Holland Park Avenue, which meant that he was, as of two o'clock that morning, voluntarily homeless.

("Bluey, just move in with me. For God's sake, you know it makes sense. You can save money while you're building up the business, and I can look after you. You shouldn't be on your own while you're recuperating. Bluey, don't be silly…

Nobody would ever call him Bluey again. Bluey was dead.)

It was the first time in their long and turbulent relationship that he had walked out. Three times previously it had been Astoria who had called a halt. There had been an unspoken awareness between them, always, that if ever he left, if ever he decided he had had enough, the parting would be of an entirely different order to all those she had instigated, none of which, painful and messy though they had been, had ever felt definitive.

Astoria would not rest until she had hurt him as badly as she could in retaliation. This morning's scene, when she had tracked him to his office, had doubtless been a mere foretaste of what would unfold in the months, even years, to come. He had never known anyone with such an appetite for revenge.

Potter limped to the bar, secured a second pint and returned to the table for further gloomy reflection. Walking out on Astoria had left him on the brink of true destitution. He was so deeply in debt that all that stood between him and a sleeping bag in a doorway was Ronald Weasley. Indeed, if Delacour called in the loan that had formed the down payment on Potter's office, Potter would have no alternative but to sleep rough.

("I'm just calling to check how things are going, Mr. Potter, because this month's installment still hasn't arrived…Can we expect it within the next few days?")

And finally (since he had started looking at the inadequacies of his life, why not make a comprehensive survey?) there was his recent weight gain; a full stone and a half, so that he not only felt fat and unfit, but was putting unnecessary additional strain on the prosthetic lower leg he was now resting on the brass bar beneath the table. Potter was developing the shadow of a limp purely because the additional load was causing some chafing. The long walk across London in the small hours, kitbag over his shoulder, had not helped. Knowing that he was heading into penury, he had been determined to travel there in the cheapest fashion.

He returned to the bar to buy a third pint. Back at his table beneath the cupola, he drew out his mobile phone and called a friend in the Metropolitan Police whose friendship, though of only a few years' duration, had been forged under exceptional conditions.

Just as Astoria was the only person to call him "Bluey," so Detective Inspector Seamus Finnigan was the only person to call Potter "Emerald Supernova," which name he bellowed at the sound of his friend's voice.

"Looking for a favor," Potter told Finnigan.

"Name it."

"Who handled the Ginny Weasley case?"

While Finnigan searched out their numbers, he asked after Potter's business, right leg and fiancée. Potter lied about the status of all three.

"Glad to hear it," said Finnigan cheerfully. "OK, here's Lockhart's number. He's all right; loves himself, but you'll be better off with him than Moody; he's a cunt. I can put in a word with Lockhart. I'll ring him right now for you, if you like."

Potter tweaked a tourist leaflet from a wooden display on the wall, and copied

down Lockhart's number in the space beside a picture of the Horse Guards. "When're you coming over?" Finnigan asked. "Bring Astoria one night." "Yeah, that'd be great. I'll give you a ring; got a lot on just now."

After hanging up, Potter sat in deep thought for a while, then called an acquaintance much older than Finnigan, whose life path had run in a roughly opposite direction.

"Calling in a favor, mate," said Potter. "Need some information." "On what?"

"You tell me. I need something I can use for leverage with a copper."

The conversation ran to twenty-five minutes, and involved many pauses, which grew longer and more pregnant until finally Potter was given an approximate address and two names, which he also copied down beside the Horse Guards, and a warning, which he did not write down, but took in the spirit in which he knew it was intended. The conversation ended on a friendly note, and Potter, now yawning widely, dialed Lockhart's number, which was answered almost immediately by a loud, curt voice.

"Lockhart."

"Yeah, hello. My name's Harry Potter, and—" "You're what?"

"Harry Potter," said Potter, "is my name."

"Oh yeah," said Lockhart. "Finnigan just rang. You're the private dick? Finnigan said you were interested in talking about Ginny Weasley?"

"Yeah, I am," said Potter again, suppressing another yawn as he examined the painted panels on the ceiling; bacchanalian revels that became, as he looked, a feast of fairies: _M__idsu__m__m__e__r__Nigh__t__'s Dr__e__am,_a man with a donkey's head. "But what I'd really like is the file."

Lockhart laughed.

"You didn't save _m__y_fucking life, mate."

"Got some information you might be interested in. Thought we could do an exchange."

There was a short pause.

"I take it you don't want to do this exchange over the phone?"

"That's right," said Potter. "Is there anywhere you like to have a pint after a hard day's work?"

Having jotted down the name of a pub near Scotland Yard, and agreed that a week today (failing any nearer date) would suit him too, Potter rang off.

It had not always been thus. A couple of years ago, he had been able to command the compliance of witnesses and suspects; he had been like Lockhart, a man whose time had more value than most of those with whom he consorted, and who could choose when, where and how long interviews would be. Like Lockhart, he had needed no uniform; he had been constantly cloaked in officialdom and prestige. Now, he was a limping man in a creased shirt, trading on old acquaintances, trying to do deals with policemen who would once have been glad to take his calls.

"Arsehole," said Potter aloud, into his echoing glass. The third pint had slid

down so easily that there was barely an inch left.

His mobile rang; glancing at the screen, he saw his office number. No doubt Hermione was trying to tell him that Jean Delacour was after money. He let her go straight to voicemail, drained his glass and left.

The street was bright and cold, the pavement damp, and the puddles intermittently silver as clouds scudded across the sun. Potter lit another cigarette outside the front door, and stood smoking it in the doorway of the Tottenham, watching the workmen as they moved around the pit in the road. Cigarette finished, he ambled off down Oxford Street to kill time until the Temporary Solution had left, and he could sleep in peace.


	6. Chapter 6

HERMIONE HAD WAITED TEN MINUTES, to make sure that Potter was not about to come back, before making several delightful telephone calls from her mobile phone. The news of her engagement was received by her friends with either squeals of excitement or envious comments, which gave Hermione equal pleasure. At lunchtime, she awarded herself an hour off, bought three bridal magazines and a packet of replacement biscuits (which put the petty cash box, a labeled shortbread tin, into her debt to the tune of forty-two pence), and returned to the empty office, where she spent a happy forty minutes examining bouquets and bridal gowns, and tingling all over with excitement.

When her self-appointed lunch hour was over, Hermione washed and returned Mr. Crowdy's cups and tray, and his biscuits. Noting how eagerly he attempted to detain her in conversation on her second appearance, his eyes wandering distractedly from her mouth to her breasts, she resolved to avoid him for the rest of the week.

Still Potter did not return. For want of anything else to do, Hermione neatened the contents of her desk drawers, disposing of what she recognized as the accumulated waste of other temporaries: two squares of dusty milk chocolate, a bald emery board and many pieces of paper carrying anonymous telephone numbers and doodles. There was a box of old-fashioned metal acro clips, which she had never come across before, and a considerable number of small, blank blue notebooks, which, though unmarked, had an air of officialdom. Hermione, experienced in the world of offices, had the feeling that they might have been pinched from an institutional store cupboard.

The office telephone rang occasionally. Her new boss seemed to be a person of many names. One man asked for "Potty"; another for "Emerald Supernova," while a dry, clipped voice asked that "Mr. Potter" return Mr. Peter Gillespie's call as soon as possible. On each occasion, Hermione contacted Potter's mobile phone, and reached only his voicemail. She therefore left verbal messages, wrote down each caller's name and number on a Post-it note, took it into Potter's office and stuck it neatly on his desk.

The pneumatic drill rumbled on and on outside. Around two o'clock, the ceiling began to creak as the occupant of the flat overhead became more active; otherwise, Hermione might have been alone in the whole building. Gradually solitude, coupled with the feeling of pure delight that threatened to burst her ribcage every time her eyes fell on the ring on her left hand, emboldened her. She began to clean and tidy the tiny room under her interim control.

In spite of its general shabbiness, and an overlying grubbiness, Hermione soon discovered a firm organizational structure that pleased her own neat and orderly nature. The brown card folders (oddly old-fashioned, in these days of neon plastic) lined up on the shelves behind her desk were arranged in date order, each

with a handwritten serial number on the spine. She opened one of them, and saw that the acro clips had been used to secure loose leaves of paper into each file. Much of the material inside was in a deceptive, difficult-to-read hand. Perhaps this was how the police worked; perhaps Potter was an ex-policeman.

Hermione discovered the stack of pink death threats to which Potter had alluded in the middle drawer of the filing cabinet, beside a slim sheaf of confidentiality agreements. She took one of these out and read it: a simple form, requesting that the signatory refrain from discussing, outside hours, any of the names or information they might be privy to during their working day. Hermione pondered for a moment, then carefully signed and dated one of the documents, carried it through to Potter's inner office, and placed it on his desk, so that he might add his name on the dotted line supplied. Taking this one-sided vow of secrecy gave back to her some of the mystique, even glamour, that she had imagined lay beyond the engraved glass door, before it had flown open and Potter had nearly bowled her down the stairwell.

It was after placing the form on Potter's desk that she spotted the kitbag stuffed away in a corner behind the filing cabinet. The edge of his dirty shirt, an alarm clock and a soap bag peeked from between the open teeth of the bag's zip. Hermione closed the door between inner and outer offices as though she had accidentally witnessed something embarrassing and private. She added together the dark-haired beauty fleeing the building that morning, Potter's various injuries and what seemed, in retrospect, to have been a slightly delayed, but determined, pursuit. In her new and joyful condition of betrothal, Hermione was disposed to feel desperately sorry for anyone with a less fortunate love life than her own—if desperate pity could describe the exquisite pleasure she actually felt at the thought of her own comparative paradise.

At five o'clock, and in the continuing absence of her temporary boss, Hermione decided that she was free to go home. She hummed to herself as she filled in her own time sheet, bursting into song as she buttoned up her trench coat; then she locked the office door, slid the spare key back through the letter box and proceeded, with some caution, back down the metal stairs, towards Matthew and home.

POTTER HAD SPENT THE EARLY afternoon at the University of London Union building, where, by dint of walking determinedly past reception with a slight scowl on his face, he had gained the showers without being challenged or asked for his student card. He had then eaten a stale ham roll and a bar of chocolate in the café. After that he had wandered, blank-eyed in his tiredness, smoking between the cheap shops he visited to buy, with Weasley's cash, the few necessities he needed now that bed and board were gone. Early evening found him holed up in an Italian restaurant, several large boxes propped up at the back, beside the bar, and spinning out his beer until he had half-forgotten why he was killing time.

It was nearly eight before he returned to the office. This was the hour when he found London most lovable; the working day over, her pub windows were warm and jewel-like, her streets thrummed with life, and the indefatigable permanence of her aged buildings, softened by the street lights, became strangely reassuring. We have seen plenty like you, they seemed to murmur soothingly, as he limped along Oxford Street carrying a boxed-up camp bed. Seven and a half million hearts were beating in close proximity in this heaving old city, and many, after all, would be aching far worse than his. Walking wearily past closing shops, while the heavens turned indigo above him, Potter found solace in vastness and anonymity.

It was some feat to force the camp bed up the metal stairwell to the second floor, and by the time he reached the entrance bearing his name the pain in the end of his right leg was excruciating. He leaned for a moment, bearing all his weight on his left foot, panting against the glass door, watching it mist.

"You fat cunt," he said aloud. "You knackered old dinosaur."

Wiping the sweat off his forehead, he unlocked the door, and heaved his various purchases over the threshold. In the inner office he pushed his desk aside and set up the bed, unrolled the sleeping bag, and filled his cheap kettle at the sink outside the glass door.

His dinner was still in a Pot Noodle, which he had chosen because it reminded him of the fare he used to carry in his ration pack: some deep-rooted association between quickly heated and rehydrated food and makeshift dwelling places had made him reach automatically for the thing. When the kettle had boiled, he added the water to the tub, and ate the rehydrated pasta with a plastic fork he had taken from the ULU café, sitting in his office chair, looking down into the almost deserted street, the traffic rumbling past in the twilight at the end of the road, and listening to the determined thud of a bass from two floors below, in the 12 Bar Café.

He had slept in worse places. There had been the stone floor of a multistory car park in Angola, and the bombed-out metal factory where they had erected tents, and woken coughing up black soot in the mornings; and, worst of all, the dank dormitory of the commune in Norfolk to which his mother had dragged him and one of his half-sisters when they were eight and six respectively. He remembered the comfortless ease of hospital beds in which he had lain for months, and various squats (also with his mother), and the freezing woods in which he had camped on army exercises. However basic and uninviting the camp bed looked lying under the one naked light bulb, it was luxurious compared with all of them.

The act of shopping for what he needed, and of setting up the bare necessities for himself, had lulled Potter back into the familiar soldierly state of doing what needed to be done, without question or complaint. He disposed of the Pot Noodle tub, turned on the lamp and sat himself down at the desk where Hermione had spent most of the day.

As he assembled the raw components of a new file—the hardback folder, the blank paper and an acro clip; the notebook in which he had recorded Weasley's interview; the pamphlet from the Tottenham; Weasley's card—he noticed the new tidiness of the drawers, the lack of dust on the computer monitor, the absence of empty cups and debris, and a faint smell of Pledge. Mildly intrigued, he opened the petty cash tin, and saw there, in Hermione's neat, rounded writing, the note that he owed her forty-two pence for chocolate biscuits. Potter pulled forty of the pounds Weasley had given him from his wallet and deposited them in the tin; then, as an afterthought, counted out forty-two pence in coins and laid it on top.

Next, with one of the pens Hermione had assembled neatly in the top drawer, Potter began to write, fluently and rapidly, beginning with the date. The notes of Weasley's interview he tore out and attached separately to the file; the actions he had taken thus far, including calls to Finnigan and to Lockhart, were noted, their numbers preserved (but the details of his other friend, the provider of useful names and addresses, were not put on file).

Finally Potter gave his new case a serial number, which he wrote, along with the legend _Sud__d__e__n__ D__e__at__h__,__Ginny__Weasley__,_on the spine, before stowing the file in its place at the far right of the shelf.

Now, at last, he opened the envelope which, according to Weasley, contained those vital clues that police had missed. The lawyer's handwriting, neat and fluid, sloped backwards in densely written lines. As Weasley had promised, the contents dealt mostly with the actions of a man whom he called "the Runner."

The Runner was a tall black man, whose face was concealed by a scarf and who appeared on the footage of a camera on a late-night bus which ran from Islington towards the West End. He had boarded this bus around fifty minutes before Ginny Weasley died. He was next seen on CCTV footage taken in Mayfair,

walking in the direction of Weasley's house, at 1:39 a.m. He had paused on camera and appeared to consult a piece of paper (_poss__an__addr__e__ss__or__dir__e__c__t__i__ons? _Weasley had added helpfully in his notes) before walking out of sight.

Footage taken from the same CCTV camera shortly after showed the Runner sprinting back past the camera at 2:12 and out of sight. _S__e__c__ond__black__m__a__n__also running—poss__lookout? Disturbed__in__c__ar__theft?__Car__alarm__w__e__nt__o__f__f__ar__o__und__the __c__orner at th__i__s t__i__m__e__,_Weasley had written.

Finally there was CCTV footage of _a__black__man __c__l__osely__res__e__mbling __t__he__Ru__n__n__e__r _walking along a road close to Gray's Inn Square, several miles away, later in the morning of Weasley's death. _Fa__c__e__st__i__ll__c__on__ce__aled,_Weasley had written.

Potter paused to rub his eyes, wincing because he had forgotten that one of them was bruised. He was now in that light-headed, twitchy state that signified true exhaustion. With a long, grunting sigh he considered Weasley's notes, with one hairy fist holding a pen ready to make his own annotations.

Weasley might interpret the law with dispassion and objectivity in the office that had provided him with his smart engraved business card, but the contents of this envelope merely confirmed Potter's view that his client's personal life was dominated by an unjustifiable obsession. Whatever the origin of Weasley's preoccupation with the Runner—whether because he nursed a secret fear of that urban bogeyman, the criminal black male, or for some other, deeper, more personal reason—it was unthinkable that the police had not investigated the Runner, and his (possibly lookout, possibly car thief) companion, and certain that they had had good reason for excluding him from suspicion.

Yawning widely, Potter turned to the second page of Weasley's notes.

_At__1__:__45,__Tom__W__i__l__son,__the__s__e__c__uri__t__y guard__on__d__uty__at__the__d__e__sk__o__ve__rnigh__t__,__felt unwell __and __w__e__nt __i__n__to the __ba__c__k __bathroom, __wh__e__re __he __r__e__main__e__d __for appro__x__imately a__quart__e__r__of__an__hour.__For__f__i__f__t__ee__n__m__inu__t__e__s__prior__to__ Ginny__'s__d__e__at__h__, ther__e__fore,__the__lobby__of__h__e__r__bui__l__ding__was__d__e__s__e__r__t__e__d__and__an__y__body __c__ould__ha__v__e __e__nter__e__d__and__e__x__i__t__e__d__wi__t__hout__b__e__ing__s__e__e__n.__W__i__l__son__o__n__ly __c__a__m__e out__of__the__bath__r__oom af__t__e__r __Ginny__f__e__l__l__, when he__h__e__ard __Hannah__Longbottom scr__e__aming._

_T__his__window__of__oppo__r__t__u__ni__t__y ta__l__l__i__e__s__ex__a__c__t__l__y wi__t__h__the t__i__me the Run__n__e__r__would ha__v__e r__e__a__c__h__e__d__18__K__e__nt__i__g__e__rn__Gard__e__ns__if__he passed the s__ec__uri__t__y __c__am__e__ra__o__n__the junction of__Ald__e__rbrook and B__e__l__l__amy__Roads at 1:__3__9._

"And how," murmured Potter, massaging his forehead, "did he see through the

front door, to know the guard was in the bog?"

_I ha__v__e__spo__k__e__n to Tom__W__i__l__son, __w__ho is happy__to be inter__v__iewe__d__._

And I bet you've paid him to do it, Potter thought, noting the security guard's

telephone number beneath these concluding words.

He laid down the pen with which he had been intending to add his own notes, and clipped Weasley's jottings into the file. Then he turned off the desk lamp and limped out to pee in the toilet on the landing. After brushing his teeth over the cracked basin, he locked the glass door, set his alarm clock and undressed.

By the neon glow of the street lamp outside, Potter undid the straps of his prosthetic, easing it from the aching stump, removing the gel liner that had become an inadequate cushion against pain. He laid the false leg beside his recharging mobile phone, maneuvered himself into his sleeping bag and lay with his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. Now, as he had feared, the leaden fatigue of the body was not enough to still the misfiring mind. The old infection was active again; tormenting him, dragging at him.

What would she be doing now?

Yesterday evening, in a parallel universe, he had lived in a beautiful apartment in a most desirable part of London, with a woman who made every man who laid eyes on her treat Potter with a kind of incredulous envy.

"Why don't you just move in with me? Oh, for God's sake, Bluey, doesn't it make sense? Why not?"

He had known, from the very first, that it was a mistake. They had tried it before, and each time it had been more calamitous than the last.

"We're engaged, for God's sake, why won't you live with me?"

She had said things that were supposed to be proofs that, in the process of almost losing him forever, she had been as irrevocably changed as he had, with his one and a half legs.

"I don't need a ring. Don't be ridiculous, Bluey. You need all your money for the new business."

He closed his eyes. There could be no going back from this morning. She had lied once too often, about something too serious. But he went over it all again, like a sum he had long since solved, afraid he had made some elementary mistake. Painstakingly he added together the constantly shifting dates, the refusal to check with chemist or doctor, the fury with which she had countered any request for clarification, and then the sudden announcement that it was over, with never a shred of proof that it had been real. Along with every other suspicious circumstance, there was his hard-won knowledge of her myth mania, her need to provoke, to taunt, to test.

"Don't you dare fucking _inv__e__st__i__gate_me. Don't you dare treat me like some drugged-up _squaddi__e__._I am not a fucking case to be solved; you're supposed to love me and you won't take my word even on _th__i__s_…"

But the lies she told were woven into the fabric of her being, her life; so that to live with her and love her was to become slowly enmeshed by them, to wrestle her for the truth, to struggle to maintain a foothold on reality. How could it have happened, that he, who from his most extreme youth had needed to investigate, to know for sure, to winkle the truth out of the smallest conundrums, could have fallen in love so hard, and for so long, with a girl who spun lies as easily as other women breathed?

"It's over," he told himself. "It had to happen."

But he had not wanted to tell Finnigan, and he could not face telling anyone else, not yet. There were friends all over London who would welcome his eagerly to their homes, who would throw open their guest rooms and their fridges, eager to condole and to help. The price of all of those comfortable beds and home-cooked meals, however, would be to sit at kitchen tables, once the clean-pajamaed children were in bed, and relive the filthy final battle with Astoria, submitting to the outraged sympathy and pity of his friends' girlfriends and wives. To this he preferred grim solitude, a Pot Noodle and a sleeping bag.

He could still feel the missing foot, ripped from his leg two and a half years before. It was there, under the sleeping bag; he could flex the vanished toes if he wanted to. Exhausted as Potter was, it took a while for him to fall asleep, and when he did, Astoria wove in and out of every dream, gorgeous, vituperative and haunted.


	7. Chapter 7

" 'WITH ALL THE GALLONS OF NEWSPRINT and hours of televised talk that have been poured forth on the subject of Ginny Weasley's death, rarely has the question been asked: _why__do we__ c__are?_

" 'She was beautiful, of course, and beautiful girls have been helping to shift newspapers ever since Dana Gibson cross-hatched lazy-lidded sirens for the _N__e__w __Y__ork__e__r._

" 'She was a redhead, too, or rather, a delicious shade of _auburn__ hair__,_and this, we were constantly told, represented progression within an industry concerned merely with surfaces. (I am dubious: could it not be that, this season, _auburn_was the "in" shade? Have we seen a sudden influx of red haired women into the industry in Weasley's wake? Have our notions of female beauty been revolutionized by her success? Are red hair Barbies now outselling white blondes or brunettes?)

" 'The family and friends of the flesh-and-blood Weasley will be distraught, of course, and have my profound sympathy. We, however, the reading, watching public, have no personal grief to justify our excesses. Young women die, every day, in "tragic" (which is to say, unnatural) circumstances: in car crashes, from overdoses, and, occasionally, because they attempted to starve themselves into conformity with the body shape sported by Weasley and her ilk. Do we spare any of these dead girls more than a passing thought, as we turn the page, and obscure their ordinary faces?' "

Hermione paused to take a sip of coffee and clear her throat.

"So far, so sanctimonious," muttered Potter.

He was sitting at the end of Hermione's desk, pasting photographs into an open folder, numbering each one, and writing a description of the subject of each in an index at the back. Hermione continued where she had left off, reading from her computer monitor.

" 'Our disproportionate interest, even grief, bears examination. Right up until the moment that Weasley took her fatal dive, it is a fair bet that tens of thousands of women would have changed places with her. Sobbing young girls laid flowers beneath the balcony of Weasley's £4.5 million penthouse flat after her crushed body was cleared away. Has even one aspiring model been deterred in her pursuit of tabloid fame by the rise and brutal fall of Ginny Weasley?' "

"Get on with it," said Potter. "Her, not you," he added hastily. "It's a woman writing, right?"

"Yes, a Rita Skeeter," said Hermione, scrolling back to the top of the screen to reveal the head shot of a jowly middle-aged blonde. "Do you want me to skip the rest?"

"No, no, keep going."

Hermione cleared her throat once more and continued.

" 'The answer, surely, is no.' That's the bit about aspiring models being deterred."

"Yeah, got that."

"Right, well…'A hundred years after Emmeline Pankhurst, a generation of pubescent females seeks nothing better than to be reduced to the status of a cut- out paper doll, a flat avatar whose fictionalized adventures mask such disturbance and distress that she threw herself from a third-story window. Appearance is all: the designer Draco Malfoy was quick to inform the press that she jumped wearing one of his dresses, which sold out in the twenty-four hours after her death. What better advert could there be than that Ginny Weasley chose to meet her maker in Malfoy?

" 'No, it is not the young woman whose loss we bemoan, for she was no more real to most of us than the Gibson girls who dripped from Dana's pen. What we mourn is the physical image flickering across a multitude of red-tops and celeb mags; an image that sold us clothes and handbags and a notion of celebrity that, in her demise, proved to be empty and transient as a soap bubble. What we actually miss, were we honest enough to admit it, are the entertaining antics of that paper-thin good-time girl, whose strip-cartoon existence of drug abuse, riotous living, fancy clothes and dangerous on-off boyfriend we can no longer enjoy.

" 'Weasley's funeral was covered as lavishly as any celebrity wedding in the tawdry magazines who feed on the famous, and whose publishers will surely mourn her demise longer than most. We were permitted glimpses of various celebrities in tears, but her family were given the tiniest picture of all; they were a surprisingly unphotogenic lot, you see.

" 'Yet the account of one mourner genuinely touched me. In response to the inquiry of a man who she may not have realized was a reGreengrass, she revealed that she had met Weasley at a treatment facility, and that they had become friends. She had taken her place in a rear pew to say farewell, and slipped as quietly away again. She has not sold her story, unlike so many others who consorted with Weasley in life. It may tell us something touching about the real Ginny Weasley, that she inspired genuine affection in an ordinary girl. As for the rest of us—' "

"Doesn't she give this ordinary girl from the treatment facility a name?"

interrupted Potter.

Hermione scanned the story silently.

"No."

Potter scratched his imperfectly shaven chin.

"Ronald didn't mention any friend from a treatment facility."

"D'you think she could be important?" asked Hermione eagerly, turning in her swivel chair to look at him.

"It could be interesting to talk to someone who knew Weasley from therapy, instead of nightclubs."

Potter had only asked Hermione to look up Weasley's connections on the internet because he had nothing else for her to do. She had already telephoned Tom Wilson, the security guard, and arranged a meeting with Potter on Friday morning at the Phoenix Café in Brixton. The day's post had comprised two circulars and a final demand; there had been no calls, and she had already organized everything in the office that could be alphabetized, stacked or arranged according to type and color.

Inspired by her Google proficiency of the previous day, therefore, he had set her this fairly pointless task. For the past hour or so she had been reading out odd snippets and articles about Weasley and her associates, while Potter put into order a stack of receipts, telephone bills and photographs relating to his only other current case.

"Shall I see whether I can find out more about that girl, then?" asked Hermione. "Yeah," said Potter absently, examining a photograph of a stocky, balding man in a suit and a very ripe-looking redhead in tight jeans. The besuited man was Mr.Geoffrey Hook; the redhead, however, bore no resemblance to Mrs. Hook, who, prior to Ronald's arrival in his office, had been Potter's only client. Potter stuck the photograph into Mrs. Hook's file and labeled it No. 12, while Hermione turned back to the computer.

For a few moments there was silence, except for the flick of photographs and the tapping of Hermione's short nails against the keys. The door into the inner office behind Potter was closed to conceal the camp bed and other signs of habitation, and the air was heavy with the scent of artificial limes, due to Potter's liberal use of cheap air-freshener before Hermione had arrived. Lest she perceive any tinge of sexual interest in his decision to sit at the other end of her desk, he had pretended to notice her engagement ring for the first time before sitting down, then made polite, studiously impersonal conversation about her fiancé for five minutes. He

learned that he was a newly qualified accountant called Justin; that it was to live with Justin that Hermione had moved to London from Yorkshire the previous month, and that the temping was a stopgap measure before finding a permanent job.

"D'you think she could be in one of these pictures?" Hermione asked, after a while. "The girl from the treatment center?"

She had brought up a screen full of identically sized photographs, each showing one or more people dressed in dark clothes, all heading from left to right, making for the funeral. Crash barriers and the blurred faces of a crowd formed the backdrop to each picture.

Most striking of all was the picture of a very tall, pale girl with golden hair drawn back into a ponytail, on whose head was perched a confection of black net and feathers. Potter recognized her, because everyone knew who she was: Daphne Greengrass, the model with whom Ginny had spent much of her last day on earth; the friend with whom Weasley had been photographed for one of the most famous shots of her career. Greengrass looked beautiful and somber as she walked towards Ginny's funeral service. She seemed to have attended alone, because there was no disembodied hand supporting her thin arm or resting on her long back.

Next to Greengrass's picture was that of a couple captioned _Film__produ__c__e__r__Neville Longbottom__and__w__i__fe__T__ansy._Longbottom was built like a bull, with short legs, a broad barrel chest and a thick neck. His hair was gray and brush-cut; his face a crumpled mass of folds, bags and moles, out of which his fleshy nose protruded like a tumor. Nevertheless, he cut an imposing figure in his expensive black overcoat, with his skeletal young wife on his arm. Almost nothing could be discerned of Tansy's true appearance, behind the upturned fur of her coat collar and the enormous round sunglasses.

Last in this top row of photographs was _Draco Malfoy,__fash__i__on__d__e__signer._He was a thin black man who was wearing a midnight-blue frock coat of exaggerated cut. His face was bowed and his expression indiscernible, due to the way the light fell on his dark head, though three large diamond earrings in the lobe facing the camera had caught the flashes and glittered like stars. Like Greengrass, he appeared to have arrived unaccompanied, although a small group of mourners, unworthy of their own legends, had been captured within the frame of his picture.

Potter drew his chair nearer to the screen, though still keeping more than an arm's length between himself and Hermione. One of the unidentified faces, half severed by the edge of the picture, was Ronald Weasley, recognizable by the short upper lip and the hamsterish teeth. He had his arm around a stricken-looking older woman with white hair; her face was gaunt and ghastly, the nakedness of her grief touching. Behind this pair was a tall, haughty-looking man who gave the impression of deploring the surroundings in which he found himself.

"I can't see anyone who might be this ordinary girl," said Hermione, moving the screen down to scrutinize more pictures of famous and beautiful people looking sad and serious. "Oh, look…Michael Corner."

He was dressed in a black T-shirt, black jeans and a military-style black overcoat. His hair, too, was black; his face all sharp planes and hollows; icy blue eyes stared directly into the camera lens. Though taller than both of them, he looked fragile compared to the companions flanking him: a large man in a suit and an anxious-looking older woman, whose mouth was open and who was making a gesture as though to clear a path ahead of them. The threesome reminded Potter of parents steering a sick child away from a party. Potter noticed that, in spite of Corner's air of disorientation and distress, he had made a good job of applying his eyeliner.

"Look at those flowers!"

Corner slid up into the top of the screen and vanished: Hermione had paused on the photograph of an enormous wreath in the shape of what Potter took, initially, to be a heart, before realizing it represented two curved angel wings, composed of white roses. An inset photograph showed a close-up of the attached card.

" 'Rest in peace, Angel Ginny. Dean Thomas,' " Hermione read aloud. "Dean Thomas? The rapper? So they knew each other, did they?"

"No, I don't think so; but there was that whole thing about him renting a flat in her building; she'd been mentioned in a couple of his songs, hadn't she? The press were all excited about him staying there…"

"You're well informed on the subject."

"Oh, you know, just magazines," said Hermione vaguely, scrolling back through the funeral photographs.

"What kind of name is 'Dean'?" Potter wondered aloud.

"His father was the dean of a college apparently and his son took that name," she enunciated clearly.

"A rap fan, are you?"

"No," said Hermione, still intent on the screen. "I just remember things like that."

She clicked off the images she was perusing and began tapping away on the keyboard again. Potter returned to his photographs. The next showed Mr. Geoffrey Hook kissing his ginger-haired companion, hand palpating one large, canvas-covered buttock, outside Ealing Broadway Tube station.

"Here's a bit of film on YouTube, look," said Hermione. "Dean Thomas talking about Ginny after she died."

"Let's see it," said Potter, rolling his chair forwards a couple of feet and then,

on second thought, back one.

The grainy little video, three inches by four, jerked into life. A large black man wearing some kind of hooded top with a fist picked out in studs on the chest sat in a black leather chair, facing an unseen interviewer. His hair was closely shaven and he wore sunglasses.

"…Ginny Weasley's suicide?" said the interviewer, who was English.

"That was fucked-up, man, that was fucked-up," replied Dean, running his hand over his smooth head. His voice was soft, deep and hoarse, with the very faintest trace of a lisp. "That's what they do to success: they hunt you down, they tear you down. That's what envy does, my friend. The motherfuckin' press chased her out that window. Let her rest in peace, I say. She's getting peace right now."

"Pretty shocking welcome to London for you," said the interviewer, "with her, y'know, like, falling past your window?"

Dean Thomas did not answer at once. He sat very still, staring at the interviewer through his opaque lenses. Then he said:

"I wasn't there, or you got someone who says I was?"

The interviewer's yelp of nervous, hastily stifled laughter jarred. "God, no, not at all—not…"

Dean turned his head and addressed someone standing off-camera.

"Think I oughta've brought my lawyers?"

The interviewer brayed with sycophantic laughter. Dean looked back at him, still unsmiling.

"Dean Thomas," said the breathless interviewer, "thank you very much for your time."

An outstretched white hand slid forwards on to the screen; Dean raised his own in a fist. The white hand reconstituted itself, and they bumped knuckles. Somebody off-screen laughed derisively. The video ended.

" 'The motherfuckin' press chased her out that window,' " Potter repeated, rolling his chair back to its original position. "Interesting point of view."

He felt his mobile phone vibrate in his trouser pocket, and drew it out. The sight of Astoria's name attached to a new text caused a surge of adrenalin through his body, as though he had just sighted a crouching beast of prey.

I will be out on Friday morning between 9 and 12 if you want to collect your things.

"What?" He had the impression that Hermione had just spoken.

"I said, there's a horrible piece here about her birth mother." "OK. Read it out."

He slid his mobile back into his pocket. As he bent his large head again over Mrs. Hook's file, his thoughts seemed to reverberate as though a gong had been struck inside his skull.

Astoria was behaving with sinister reasonableness; feigning adult calm. She had taken their endlessly elaborate duel to a new level, never before reached or tested: "Now let's do it like grown-ups." Perhaps a knife would plunge between his shoulder blades as he walked through the front door of her flat; perhaps he would walk into the bedroom to discover her corpse, wrists slit, lying in a puddle of congealing blood in front of the fireplace.

Hermione's voice was like the background drone of a vacuum cleaner. With an effort, he refocused his attention.

" '…sold the romantic story of her liaison with a young black man to as many tabloid journalists as were prepared to pay. There is nothing romantic, however, about Marlene Higson's story as it is remembered by her old neighbors.

" ' "She was turning tricks," says Vivian Cranfield, who lived in the flat above Higson's at the time she fell pregnant with Weasley. "There were men coming in and out of her place every hour of the day and night. She never knew who that baby's father was, it could have been any of them. She never wanted the baby. I can still remember her out in the hall, crying, on her own, while her mum was busy with a punter. Tiny little thing in her nappy, hardly walking…someone must have called Social Services, and not before time. Best thing that ever happened to that girl, getting adopted."

" 'The truth will, no doubt, shock Weasley, who has talked at length in the press about her reunion with her long-lost birth mother…'—this was written," explained Hermione, "before Ginny died."

"Yeah," said Potter, closing the folder abruptly. "D' you fancy a walk?"


	8. Chapter 8

THE CAMERAS LOOKED LIKE MALEVOLENT shoeboxes atop their pole, each with a single blank, black eye. They pointed in opposite directions, staring the length of Alderbrook Road, which bustled with pedestrians and traffic. Both pavements were crammed with shops, bars and cafés. Double-deckers rumbled up and down bus lanes.

"This is where Weasley's Runner was caught on film," observed Potter, turning his back on Alderbrook Road to look up the much quieter Bellamy Road, which led, lined with tall and palatial houses, into the residential heart of Mayfair. "He passed here twelve minutes after she fell…this'd be the quickest route from Kentigern Gardens. Night buses run here. Best bet to pick up a taxi. Not that that'd be a smart move if you'd just murdered a woman."

He buried himself again in an extremely battered _A–__Z__._Potter did not seem worried that anyone might mistake him for a tourist. No doubt, thought Hermione, it would not matter if they did, given his size.

Hermione had been asked to do several things, in the course of her brief temping career, that were outside the terms of a secretarial contract, and had therefore been a little unnerved by Potter's suggestion of a walk. She was pleased, however, to acquit Potter of any flirtatious intent. The long walk to this spot had been conducted in almost total silence, Potter apparently deep in thought, and occasionally consulting his map.

Upon their arrival in Alderbrook Road, however, he had said:

"If you spot anything, or you think of anything I haven't, tell me, won't you?"

This was rather thrilling: Hermione prided herself on her observational powers; they were one reason she had secretly cherished the childhood ambition that the large man beside her was living. She looked intelligently up and down the street, and tried to visualize what someone might have been up to, on a snowy night, in sub-zero temperatures, at two in the morning.

"This way," said Potter, however, before any insights could occur to her, and they walked off, side by side, along Bellamy Road. It curved gently to the left and continued for some sixty houses, which were almost identical, with their glossy black doors, their short railings either side of clean white steps and their topiary-filled tubs. Here and there were marble lions and brass plaques, giving names and professional credentials; chandeliers glinted from upper windows, and one door stood open to reveal a checkerboard floor, oil paintings in gold frames and a Georgian staircase.

As he walked, Potter pondered some of the information that Hermione had managed to find on the internet that morning. As Potter had suspected, Weasley had not been honest when he asserted that the police had made no effort to trace

the Runner and his sidekick. Buried in voluminous and rabid press coverage that survived online were appeals for the men to come forward, but they seemed to have yielded no results.

Unlike Weasley, Potter did not find any of this suggestive of police incompetence, or of a plausible murder suspect left uninvestigated. The sudden sounding of a car alarm around the time that the two men had fled the area suggested a good reason for their reluctance to talk to the police. Moreover, Potter did not know whether Weasley was familiar with the varying quality of CCTV footage, but he himself had extensive experience of frustrating blurry black-and-white images from which it was impossible to glean a true likeness.

Potter had also noticed that Weasley had said not a word in person, or in his notes, about the DNA evidence gathered from inside his sister's flat. He strongly suspected, from the fact that the police had been happy to exclude the Runner and his friend from further inquiries, which no trace of foreign DNA had been found there. However, Potter knew that the truly deluded would happily discount such trivialities as DNA evidence, citing contamination, or conspiracy. They saw what they wanted to see, blind to inconvenient, implacable truth.

But the Google searches of the morning had suggested a possible explanation for Weasley's fixation on the Runner. His sister had been researching her biological roots, and had managed to trace her birth mother, who sounded, even when allowance was made for press sensationalism, an unsavory character. Doubtless revelations such as those that Hermione had found online would have been unpleasant not just for Ginny Prewitt(he had started referring to the model by her stage name so as to keep the brother and sister apart), but for her whole adoptive family. Was it part of Weasley's instability (for Potter could not pretend to himself that his client gave the impression of a well-balanced man) that he believed Ginny, so fortunate in some ways, had tempted fate? That she had stirred up trouble in trying to plumb the secrets of her origins; that she had woken a demon that had reached out of the distant past, and killed her? Was that why a black man in her vicinity so disturbed him?

Deeper and deeper into the enclave of the wealthy, Potter and Hermione walked, until they arrived at the corner of Kentigern Gardens. Like Bellamy Road, it projected an aura of intimidating, self-contained prosperity. The houses here were high Victorian, red brick with stone dressings and heavy pedimented windows on four floors, with their own small stone balconies. White marble porticos framed each entrance, and three white steps led from the pavement to more glossy black front doors. Everything was expensively well maintained, clean and regimented. There were only a few cars parked here; a small sign declared that permits were needed for the privilege.

No longer set apart by police tape and massing journalists, number 18 had faded back into graceful conformity with its neighbors.

"The balcony she fell from was on the top floor," said Potter, "about forty feet up, I'd say."

He contemplated the handsome frontage. The balconies on the top three floors, Hermione saw, were shallow, with barely standing room between the balustrade and the long windows.

"The thing is," Potter told Hermione, while he squinted at the balcony high above them, "pushing someone from that height wouldn't guarantee death."

"Oh—but surely?" protested Hermione, contemplating the awful drop between top balcony and hard road.

"You'd be surprised. I spent a month in a bed next to a Welsh bloke who got blown off a building about that height. Smashed his legs and pelvis, lot of internal bleeding, but he's still with us."

Hermione glanced at Potter, wondering why he had been in bed for a month; but the detective was oblivious, now scowling at the front door.

"Keypad," he muttered, noting the metal square inset with buttons, "and a camera over the door. Weasley didn't mention a camera. Could be new."

He stood for a few minutes testing theories against the intimidating red-brick face of these fantastically expensive fortresses. Why had Ginny Prewitt chosen to live here in the first place? Sedate, traditional, stuffy, Kentigern Gardens was surely the natural domain of a different kind of rich: Russian and Arab oligarchs; corporate giants splitting their time between town and their country estates; wealthy spinsters, slowly decaying amidst their art collections. He found it a strange choice of abode for a girl of twenty-three, who ran, according to every story Hermione had read out that morning, with a hip, creative crowd, whose celebrated sense of style owed more to the street than the salon.

"It looks very well protected, doesn't it?" said Hermione.

"Yeah, it does. And that's without the crowd of paparazzi who were standing guard over it that night."

Potter leaned back against the black railings of number 23, staring at number

18. The windows of Prewitt's former residence were taller than those on the lower floors, and its balcony, unlike the other two, had not been decorated with topiary shrubs. Potter slipped a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and offered Hermione one; she shook her head, surprised, because she had not seen him smoke in the office. Having lit up and inhaled deeply, he said, with his eyes on the front door:

"Weasley thinks someone got in and out that night, undetected."

Hermione, who had already decided that the building was impenetrable, thought that Potter was about to pour scorn on the theory, but she was wrong.

"If they did," said Potter, eyes still on the door, "it was planned, and planned well. Nobody could've got past photographers, a keypad, a security guard and a closed inner door, and out again, on luck alone. Thing is," he scratched his chin, "that degree of premeditation doesn't fit with such a slapdash murder."

Hermione found the choice of adjective callous.

"Pushing someone over a balcony's a spur-of-the-moment thing," said Potter,

as though he had felt her inner wince. "Hot blood. Blind temper."

He found Hermione's company satisfactory and restful, not only because she was hanging off his every word, and had not troubled to break his silences, but because that little sapphire ring on her third finger was like a neat full stop: this far, and no further. It suited him perfectly. He was free to show off, in a very mild way, which was one of the few pleasures remaining to him.

"But what if the killer was already inside?"

"That's a lot more plausible," said Potter, and Hermione felt very pleased with herself. "And if a killer was already in there, we've got the choice between the security guard himself, one or both of the Longbottoms, or some unknown person who was hiding in the building without anyone's knowledge. If it was either of the Longbottoms, or Wilson, there's no getting-in-and-out problem; all they had to do was return to the places they were supposed to be. There was still the risk she could have survived, injured, to tell the tale, but a hot-blooded, unpremeditated crime makes a lot more sense if one of them did it. A row and a blind shove."

Potter smoked his cigarette and continued to scrutinize the front of the building, in particular the gap between the windows on the first floor and those on the third. He was thinking primarily about Neville Longbottom, the film producer. According to what Hermione had found on the internet, Longbottom had been in bed asleep when Ginny Prewitt toppled over the balcony two floors above. The fact that it was Longbottom's own wife who had sounded the alarm, and insisted that the killer was still upstairs while her husband stood beside her, implied that she, at least, did not think him guilty. Nevertheless, Neville Longbottom had been the man in closest proximity to the dead girl at the time of her death. Laymen, in Potter's experience, were obsessed with motive: opportunity topped the professional's list.

Unwittingly confirming her civilian status, Hermione said:

"But why would someone pick the middle of the night to have an argument with her? Nothing ever came out about her not getting on with her neighbors, did it? And Hannah Longbottom definitely couldn't have done it, could she? Why would

she run downstairs and tell the security guard if she'd just pushed Ginny over the balcony?"

Potter did not answer directly; he seemed to be following his own train of thought, and after a moment or two replied:

"Weasley's fixated on the quarter of an hour after his sister went inside, after the photographers had left and the security guard had abandoned the desk because he was ill. That meant the lobby became briefly navigable—but how was anyone outside the building supposed to know that Wilson had left his post? The front door's not made of glass."

"Plus," interjected Hermione intelligently, "they'd have needed to know the key code to open the front door."

"People get slack. Unless the security people change it regularly, loads of undesirables could have known that code. Let's have a look down here."

They walked in silence right to the end of Kentigern Gardens, where they found a narrow alleyway which ran, at a slightly oblique angle, along the rear of Prewitt's block of houses. Potter was amused to note that the alley was called Serf's Way. Wide enough to allow a single car to pass, it had plentiful lighting and was devoid of hiding places, with long, high, smooth walls on either side of the cobbled passageway. They came in due course to a pair of large, electrically operated garage doors, with an enormous PRIVATEsign affixed to the wall beside them, which guarded the entrance to the underground cache of parking spaces for the Kentigern Gardeners.

When he judged that they were roughly level with the back of number 18, Potter made a leap, caught hold of the top of the wall and heaved himself up to look into a long row of small, carefully manicured gardens. Between each patch of smooth and well-tended lawn and the house to which it belonged was a shadowy stairwell to basement level. Anyone wishing to climb the rear of the house would, in Potter's opinion, require ladders, or a partner to belay him, and some sturdy ropes.

He let himself slide back down the wall, emitting a stifled grunt of pain as he landed on the prosthetic leg.

"It's nothing," he said, when Hermione made a concerned noise; she had noticed the vestige of a limp, and wondered whether he had sprained an ankle.

The chafing on the end of the stump was not helped by hobbling off over the cobbles. It was much harder, given the rigid construction of his false ankle, to navigate uneven surfaces. Potter asked himself ruefully whether he had really needed to hoist himself up on the wall at all. Hermione might be a pretty girl, but she could not hold a candle to the woman he had just left.


	9. Chapter 9

"AND YOU'RE _SURE _HE'S A detective, are you? Because anyone can do that. Anyone

can google people."

Justin was irritable after a long day, a disgruntled client and an unsatisfactory encounter with his new boss. He did not appreciate what struck him as naive and misplaced admiration for another man on the part of his fiancée.

"_He _wasn't googling people," said Hermione. "_I _was the one doing the googling, while he was working on another case."

"Well I don't like the sound of the set-up. He's sleeping in his office, Hermione; don't you think there's something a bit fishy there?"

"I told you, I think he's just split up with his partner." "Yeah, I'll bet he has," said Justin.

Hermione dropped his plate down on top of her own and stalked off into the kitchen. She was angry at Justin, and vaguely annoyed with Potter, too. She had enjoyed tracking Ginny Prewitt's acquaintance across cyberspace that day; but seeing it retrospectively through Justin's eyes, it seemed to her that Potter had given her a pointless, time-filling job.

"Look, I'm not _saying _anything," Justin said, from the kitchen doorway. "I

just think he sounds weird. And what's with the little afternoon walks?"

"It wasn't a _little afternoon walk, _Matt. We went to see the scene of the—we went to see the place where the client thinks something happened."

"Hermione, there's no need to make such a bloody mystery about it," Justin

laughed.

"I've signed a confidentiality agreement," she snapped over her shoulder. "I can't tell you about the case." "_The case."_

He gave another short, scoffing laugh.

Hermione strode around the tiny kitchen, putting away ingredients, slamming cupboard doors. After a while, watching her figure as she moved around, Justin came to feel that he might have been unreasonable. He came up behind her as she was scraping the leftovers into the bin, put his arms around her, buried his face in her neck and cupped and stroked the breast that bore the bruises Potter had accidentally inflicted, and which had irrevocably colored Justin's view of the man. He murmured conciliatory phrases into Hermione's bronze-colored hair; but she pulled away from him to put the plates into the sink.

Hermione felt as though her own worth had been impugned. Potter had seemed interested in the things she had found online. Potter expressed gratitude for her efficiency and initiative.

"How many proper interviews have you got next week?" Justin asked, as

she turned on the cold tap.

"Three," she shouted over the noise of the gushing water, scrubbing the top

plate aggressively.

She waited until he had walked away into the sitting room before turning off the tap. There was, she noticed, a fragment of frozen pea caught in the setting of her engagement ring.

POTTER ARRIVED AT ASTORIA'S FLAT at half past nine on Friday morning. This gave her, he reasoned, half an hour to be well clear of the place before he entered it, assuming that she really was intending to leave, rather than lie in wait for him. The grand and gracious white buildings that lined the wide street; the plane trees; the butcher's shop that might have been stuck in the 1950s; the cafés bustling with the upper middle classes; the sleek restaurants; they had always felt slightly unreal and stagey to Potter. Perhaps he had always known, deep down, that he would not stay, that he did not belong.

Until the moment he unlocked the front door, he expected her to be there; yet as soon as he stepped over the threshold, he knew that the place was empty. The silence had that slack quality that speaks only of the indifference of uninhabited rooms, and his footsteps sounded alien and overloud as he made his way down the hall.

Four cardboard boxes stood in the middle of the sitting room, open for him to inspect. Here were his cheap and serviceable belongings, heaped together, like jumble-sale objects. He lifted a few things up to check the deeper levels, but nothing seemed to have been smashed, ripped or covered in paint. Other people his age had houses and washing machines, cars and television sets, furniture and gardens and mountain bikes and lawn mowers: he had four boxes of crap, and a set of matchless memories.

The silent room in which he stood spoke of a confident good taste, with its antique rug and its pale flesh-pink walls; its fine dark-wood furniture and its overflowing bookcases. The only change he spotted since Sunday night stood on the glass end table beside the sofa. On Sunday night there had been a picture of himself and Astoria, laughing on the beach at St. Mawes. Now a black-and- white studio portrait of Astoria's dead father smiled benignly at Potter from the same silver picture frame.

Over the mantelpiece hung a portrait of an eighteen-year-old Astoria, in oils. It showed the face of a Florentine angel in a cloud of long dark hair. Hers was the kind of family that commissioned painters to immortalize its young: a background utterly alien to Potter, and one he had come to know like a dangerous foreign country. From Astoria he had learned that the kind of money he had never known could coexist with unhappiness and savagery. Her family, for all their gracious manners, their suavity and flair, their erudition and occasional flamboyance, was even madder and stranger than his own. That had been a powerful link between them, when first he and Astoria had come together.

A strange stray thought came to him now, as he looked up at that portrait: that this was the reason it had been painted, so that one day, its large hazel-green eyes would watch him leave. Had Astoria known what it would feel like, to prowl

the empty flat under the eyes of her stunning eighteen-year-old self? Had she realized that the painting would do her work better than her physical presence?

He turned away, striding through the other rooms, but she had left nothing for him to do. Every trace of him, from his tooth floss to his army boots, had been taken and deposited in the boxes. He studied the bedroom with particular attention, and the room looked back at him, with its dark floorboards, white curtains and delicate dressing table, calm and composed. The bed, like the portrait, seemed a living, breathing presence. _Remember what happened here, and what can never happen again._

He carried the four boxes one by one out on to the doorstep, on the last trip coming face to face with the smirking next-door neighbor, who was locking his own front door. He wore rugby shirts with the collars turned up, and always brayed with panting laughter at Astoria's lightest witticisms.

"Having a clear-out?" he asked.

Potter shut Astoria's door firmly on him.

He slid the door keys off his key ring in front of the hall mirror, and laid them carefully on the half-moon table, next to the bowl of potpourri. Potter's face in the glass was creviced and dirty-looking; his right eye still puffy; yellow and mauve. A voice from seventeen years before came to him in the silence: "How the fuck did a pube-headed trog like you ever pull _that, _Potter?" And it seemed incredible that he ever had, as he stood there in the hall he would never see again.

One last moment of madness, the space between heartbeats, like the one that had sent him hurtling after her five days previously: he would stay here, after all, waiting for her to return; then cupping her perfect face in his hands and saying "Let's try again."

But they had already tried, again and again and again, and always, when the first crashing wave of mutual longing subsided, the ugly wreck of the past lay revealed again, its shadow lying darkly over everything they tried to rebuild.

He closed the front door behind him for the last time. The braying neighbor had vanished. Potter lifted the four boxes down the steps on to the pavement, and waited to hail a black cab.

POTTER HAD TOLD HERMIONE THAT he would be late into the office on her last morning. He had given her the spare key, and told her to let herself in.

She had been very slightly hurt by his casual use of the word "last." It told her that however well they had got along, albeit in a guarded and professional way; however much more organized his office was, and how much cleaner the horrible washroom outside the glass door; however much better the bell downstairs looked, without that scrappy piece of paper taped beneath it, but a neatly typed name in the clear plastic holder (it had taken her half an hour, and cost her two broken nails, to prize the cover off); however efficient she had been at taking messages, however intelligently she had discussed the almost certainly nonexistent killer of Ginny Prewitt, Potter had been counting down the days until he could get rid of her.

That he could not afford a temporary secretary was perfectly obvious. He had only two clients; he seemed (as Justin kept mentioning, as though sleeping in an office was a mark of terrible depravity) to be homeless; Hermione saw, of course, that from Potter's point of view it made no sense to keep her on. But she was not looking forward to Monday. There would be a strange new office (Temporary Solutions had already telephoned through the address); a neat, bright, bustling place, no doubt, full of gossipy women as most of these offices were, all engaged in activities that meant less than nothing to her. Hermione might not believe in a murderer; she knew that Potter did not believe either; but the process of proving one nonexistent fascinated her.

Hermione had found the whole week more exciting than she would ever have confessed to Justin. All of it, even calling Neville Longbottom's production company, BestFilms, twice a day, and receiving repeated refusals to her requests to be put through to the film producer, had given her a sense of importance she had rarely experienced during her working life. Hermione was fascinated by the interior workings of other people's minds: she had been halfway through a psychology degree when an unforeseen incident had finished her university career.

Half past ten, and Potter had still not returned to the office, but a large woman wearing a nervous smile, an orange coat and a purple knitted beret _had _arrived. This was Mrs. Hook, a name familiar to Hermione because it was that of Potter's only other client. Hermione installed Mrs. Hook on the sagging sofa beside her own desk, and fetched her a cup of tea. (Acting on Hermione's awkward description of the lascivious Mr. Crowdy downstairs, Potter had bought cheap cups and a box of their own tea bags.)

"I know I'm early," said Mrs. Hook, for the third time, taking ineffectual little sips of boiling tea. "I haven't seen you before, are you new?"

"I'm temporary," said Hermione.

"As I expect you've guessed, it's my husband," said Mrs. Hook, not listening. "I suppose you see women like me all the time, don't you? Wanting to know the worst. I dithered for ages and ages. But it's best to know, isn't it? Best to know. I thought Harry would be here. Is he out on another case?"

"That's right," said Hermione, who suspected that Potter was actually doing something related to his mysterious personal life; there had been a caginess about him as he had told her he would be late.

"Do you know who his father is?" asked Mrs. Hook.

"No, I don't," said Hermione, thinking that they were talking about the poor woman's husband.

"James Potter," said Mrs. Hook, with a kind of dramatic relish. "James Pott—"

Hermione caught her breath, realizing simultaneously that Mrs. Hook meant Potter, and that Potter's massive frame was looming up outside the glass door. She could see that he was Blackying something very large.

"Just one moment, Mrs. Hook," she said.

"What?" asked Potter, peering around the edge of the cardboard box, as Hermione darted out of the glass door and closed it behind her.

"Mrs. Hook's here," she whispered.

"Oh, for fuck's sake. She's an hour early."

"I know. I thought you might want to, um, organize your office a bit before you take her in there."

Potter eased the cardboard box on to the metal floor.

"I've got to bring these in off the street," he said. "I'll help," offered Hermione.

"No, you go and make polite conversation. She's taking a pottery class and she thinks her husband's sleeping with his accountant."

Potter limped off down the stairs, leaving the box beside the glass door. James Potter; could it be true?

"He's on his way, just coming," Hermione told Mrs. Hook brightly, resettling herself at her desk. "Mr. Potter told me you do pottery. I've always wanted to try…"

For five minutes, Hermione barely listened to the exploits of the pottery class, and the sweetly understanding young man who taught them. Then the glass door opened and Potter entered, unencumbered by boxes and smiling politely at Mrs. Hook, who jumped up to greet him.

"Oh, Harry, your eye!" she said. "Has somebody punched you?"

"No," said Potter. "If you'll give me a moment, Mrs. Hook, I'll get out your file."

"I know I'm early, Harry, and I'm awfully sorry…I couldn't sleep at all

last night…"

"Let me take your cup, Mrs. Hook," said Hermione, and she successfully distracted the client from glimpsing, in the seconds it took Potter to slip through the inner door, the camp bed, the sleeping bag and the kettle.

A few minutes later, Potter re-emerged on a waft of artificial limes, and Mrs. Hook vanished, with a terrified look at Hermione, into his office. The door closed behind them.

Hermione sat down at her desk again. She had already opened the morning's post. She swung side to side on her swivel chair; then she moved to the computer and casually brought up Wikipedia. Then, with a disengaged air, as though she was unaware of what her fingers were up to, she typed in the two names: _James Potter._

The entry appeared at once, headed by a black-and-white photograph of an instantly recognizable man, famous for four decades. He had a narrow Harlequin's face and wild eyes, which were easy to caricature, the left one slightly off-kilter due to a weak divergent squint; his mouth was wide open, sweat pouring down his face, hair flying as he bellowed into a microphone.

Jameson Charlus "James" Potter, b. August 1st 1948, is the lead singer of 70s rock band The Deadbeats, member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, multi–Grammy Award winner…

Potter looked nothing like him; the only slight resemblance was in the same cheekbones and the nose, which in Potter was, after all, a transient condition.

Down the entry Hermoine scrolled

…multi-platinum album Hold It Back in 1975. A record-breaking tour of America was interrupted by a drugs bust in LA and the arrest of new guitarist Sirius Black, with whom…

until she reached Personal Life:

Potter has been married three times: to art-school girlfriend Shirley Mullens (1969–1973), with whom he has one daughter, Maimie; to model, actress and human rights activist Carla Astolfi (1975–1979), with whom he has two daughters, television presenter Gabriella Potter and jewelry designer Daniella Potter, and (1981–present) to film producer Jenny Graham, with whom he has two sons, Edward and Al. Potter also has a daughter, Prudence Donleavy, from his relationship with the actress Lindsey Fanthrope, and a son, Harry, with 1970s supergroupie Lily Potter.

A piercing scream rose in the inner office behind Hermione. She jumped to her feet, her chair skittering away from her on its wheels. The scream became louder and shriller. Hermione ran across the office to pull open the inner door.

Mrs. Hook, divested of orange coat and purple beret, and wearing what looked like a flowery pottery smock over jeans, had thrown herself on Potter's chest and was punching it, all the while making a noise like a boiling kettle. On and on the one-note scream went, until it seemed that she must draw breath or suffocate.

"Mrs. Hook!" cried Hermione, and she seized the woman's flabby upper arms from behind, attempting to relieve Potter of the responsibility of fending her off. Mrs. Hook, however, was much more powerful than she looked; though she paused to breathe, she continued to punch Potter until, having no choice, he caught both her wrists and held them in midair.

At this, Mrs. Hook twisted free of his loose grip and flung herself on Hermione instead, howling like a dog.

Patting the sobbing woman on the back, Hermione maneuvered her, by minuscule increments, back into the outer office.

"It's all right, Mrs. Hook, it's all right," she said soothingly, lowering her into the sofa. "Let me get you a cup of tea. It's all right."

"I'm very sorry, Mrs. Hook," said Potter formally, from the doorway into his

office. "It's never easy to get news like this."

"I th-thought it was Valerie," whimpered Mrs. Hook, her disheveled head in her hands, rocking backwards and forwards on the groaning sofa. "I th-thought it was Valerie, n-not my own—n-not my own _sister."_

"I'll get tea!" whispered Hermione, appalled.

She was almost out of the door with the kettle when she remembered that she had left James Potter's life story up on the computer monitor. It would look too odd to dart back to switch it off in the middle of this crisis, so she hurried out of the room, hoping that Potter would be too busy with Mrs. Hook to notice.

It took a further forty minutes for Mrs. Hook to drink her second cup of tea and sob her way through half the toilet roll Hermione had liberated from the bathroom on the landing. At last she left, clutching the folder full of incriminating photographs, and the index detailing the time and place of their creation, her breast heaving, still mopping her eyes.

Potter waited until she was clear of the end of the street, then went out, humming cheerfully, to buy sandwiches for himself and Hermione, which they enjoyed together at her desk. It was the friendliest gesture that he had made during their week together, and Hermione was sure that this was because he knew that he would soon be free of her.

"You know I'm going out this afternoon to interview Tom Wilson?" he

asked.

"The security guard who had diarrhea," said Hermione. "Yes."

"You'll be gone when I get back, so I'll sign your time sheet before I go. And

listen, thanks for…"

Potter nodded at the now empty sofa.

"Oh, no problem. Poor woman."

"Yeah. She's got the good on him anyway. And," he continued, "thanks for everything you've done this week."

"It's my job," said Hermione lightly.

"If I could afford a secretary…but I expect you'll end up pulling down a serious salary as some fat cat's PA."

Hermione felt obscurely offended.

"That's not the kind of job I want," she said.

There was a slightly strained silence.

Potter was undergoing a small internal struggle. The prospect of Hermione's desk being empty next week was a gloomy one; he found her company pleasantly undemanding, and her efficiency refreshing; but it would surely be pathetic, not to mention profligate, to pay for companionship, as though he were some rich, sickly Victorian magnate? Temporary Solutions were rapacious in their demand for commission; Hermione was a luxury he could not afford. The fact that she had not questioned him about his father (for Potter had noticed James Potter's Wikipedia entry on the computer monitor) had impressed him further in her favor, for this showed unusual restraint, and was a standard by which he often judged new acquaintances. But it could make no difference to the cold practicalities of the situation: she had to go.

And yet he was close to feeling about her as he had felt towards a grass snake that he had succeeded in trapping in Trevaylor Woods when he was eleven, and about which he had had a long, pleading argument with his Auntie Petunia: "_Please _let me keep it…_please_…"

"I'd better get going," he said, after he had signed her time sheet, and thrown his sandwich wrappers and his empty water bottle into the bin underneath her desk. "Thanks for everything, Hermione. Good luck with the job hunt."

He took down his overcoat, and left through the glass door.

At the top of the stairs, on the precise spot where he had both nearly killed and then saved her, he came to a halt. Instinct was clawing at him like an importuning dog.

The glass door banged open behind him and he turned. Hermione was pink in the face.

"Look," she said. "We could come to a private arrangement. We could cut out

Temporary Solutions, and you could pay me directly."

He hesitated.

"They don't like that, temping agencies. You'll be drummed out of the

service."

"It doesn't matter. I've got three interviews for permanent jobs next week. If you'd be OK about me taking time off to go to them—"

"Yeah, no problem," he said, before he could stop himself. "Well then, I could stay for another week or two."

A pause. Sense entered into a short, violent skirmish with instinct and inclination, and was overwhelmed.

"Yeah…all right. Well, in that case, will you try Neville Longbottom again?"

"Yes, of course," said Hermione, masking her glee under a show of calm efficiency.

"I'll see you Monday afternoon, then."

It was the first grin he had ever dared give her. He supposed he ought to be annoyed with himself, and yet Potter stepped out into the cool early afternoon with no feeling of regret, but rather a curious sense of renewed optimism.


	10. Chapter 10

POTTER HAD ONCE TRIED TO count the number of schools he had attended in his youth, and had reached the figure of seventeen with the suspicion that he had forgotten a couple. He did not include the brief period of supposed home schooling which had taken place during the two months he had lived with his mother and half-sister in a squat in Atlantic Road in Brixton. His mother's then boyfriend, a white Rastafarian musician who had rechristened himself Shumba, felt that the school system reinforced patriarchal and materialistic values with which his common-law stepchildren ought not to be tainTed. The principal lesson that Potter had learned during his two months of home-based education was that cannabis, even if administered spiritually, could render the taker both dull and paranoid.

He took an unnecessary detour through Brixton Market on the way to the café where he was meeting Tom Wilson. The fishy smell of the covered arcades; the colorful open faces of the supermarkets, teeming with unfamiliar fruit and vegetables from Africa and the West Indies; the halal butchers and the hairdressers, with large pictures of ornate braids and curls, and rows and rows of white polystyrene heads bearing wigs in the windows: all of it took Potter back twenty-six years, to the months he had spent wandering the Brixton streets with Lucy, his young half-sister, while his mother and Shumba lay dozily on dirty cushions back at the squat, vaguely discussing the important spiritual concepts in which the children ought to be instructed.

Seven-year-old Lucy had yearned for hair like the West Indian girls. On the long drive back to St. Mawes that had terminated their Brixton life, she had expressed a fervent desire for beaded braids from the back seat of Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia's Morris Minor. Potter remembered Aunt Petunia's calm agreement that the style was very pretty, a frown line between her eyebrows reflected in the rearview mirror. Petunia had tried, with diminishing success through the years, not to disparage their mother in front of the children. Potter had never discovered how Uncle Vernon had found out where they were living; all he knew was that he and Lucy had let themselves into the squat one afternoon to find their mother's enormous brother standing in the middle of the room, threatening Shumba with a bloody nose. Within two days, he and Lucy were back in St. Mawes, at the primary school they attended intermittently for years, taking up with old friends as though they had not left, and swiftly losing the accents they had adopted for camouflage, wherever Leda had last taken them.

He had not needed the directions Tom Wilson had given Hermione, because he knew the Phoenix Café on Coldharbour Lane of old. Occasionally Shumba and his mother had taken them there: a tiny, brown-painted, shed-like place where you could (if not a vegetarian, like Shumba and his mother) eat large and delicious cooked breakfasts, with eggs and bacon piled high, and mugs of tea the color of teak. It was almost exactly as he remembered: cozy, snug and dingy, its

mirrored walls reflecting tables of mock-wood Formica, stained floor tiles of dark red and white, and a tapioca-colored ceiling covered in molded wallpaper. The squat middle-aged waitress had short straightened hair and dangling orange plastic earrings; she moved aside to let Potter past the counter.

A heavily built West Indian man was sitting alone at one table, reading a copy of the _Sun, _under a plastic clock that bore the legend _Pu__kk__a Pi__e__s._

"Tom?"

"Yeah…you Potter?"

Potter shook Wilson's big, dry hand, and sat down. He estimated Wilson to be almost as tall as himself when standing. Muscle as well as fat swelled the sleeves of the security guard's sweatshirt; his hair was close-cropped and he was clean- shaven, with fine almond-shaped eyes. Potter ordered pie and mash off the scrawled menu board on the back wall, pleased to reflect that he could charge the

£4.75 to expenses.

"Yeah, the pie 'n' mash is good here," said Wilson.

A faint Caribbean lilt lifted his London accent. His voice was deep, calm and measured. Potter thought that he would be a reassuring presence in a security guard's uniform.

"Thanks for meeting me, I appreciate it. Ronald Weasley's not happy with the results of the inquest on his sister. He's hired me to take another look at the evidence."

"Yeah," said Wilson, "I know."

"How much did he give you to talk to me?" Potter asked casually.

Wilson blinked, then gave a slightly guilty, deep-throated chuckle.

"Pony," he said. "But if it makes the man feel better, yuh know? It won't change nuthin'. She killed huhself. But ask your questions. I don't mind."

He closed the _Sun._The front page bore a picture of Gordon Brown looking baggy-eyed and exhausted.

"You'll have gone over everything with the police," said Potter, opening his notebook and setting it down beside his plate, "but it would be good to hear, first hand, what happened that night."

"Yeah, no problem. An' Colin Creevy might be comin'," Wilson

added.

He seemed to expect Potter to know who this was.

"Who?" asked Potter.

"Colin Creevy. He was Ginny's regular driver. He wants to talk to you too."

"OK, great," said Potter. "When will he be here?" "I dunno. He's on a job. He'll come if he can."

The waitress put a mug of tea in front of Potter, who thanked her and clicked out the nib of his pen. Before he could ask anything, Wilson said:

"You're ex-milit'ry, Mister Weasley said." "Yeah," said Potter.

"Mi nephew's in Afghanistan," said Wilson, sipping his tea. "Helmand

Province."

"What regiment?" "Signals," said Wilson.

"How long's he been out there?"

"Four month. His mother's not sleeping," said Wilson. "How come you left?" "Got my leg blown off," said Potter, with an honesty that was not habitual.

It was only part of the truth, but the easiest part to communicate to a stranger. He could have stayed; they had been keen to keep him; but the loss of his calf and foot had merely precipitated a decision he had felt stealing towards him in the past couple of years. He knew that his personal tipping point was drawing nearer; that moment by which, unless he left, he would find it too onerous to go, to readjust to civilian life. The army shaped you, almost imperceptibly, with the years; wore you into a surface conformity that made it easier to be swept along by the tidal force of military life. Potter had never become entirely submerged, and had chosen to go before that happened. Even so, he remembered the SIB with a fondness that was unaffected by the loss of half a limb. He would have been glad to remember Charlotte with the same uncomplicated affection.

Wilson acknowledged Potter's explanation with a slow nod of the head. "Tough," he said, in his deep voice.

"I got off light compared with some."

"Yeah. Guy in mi nephew's platoon got blown up two weeks ago."

Wilson sipped his tea.

"How did you get on with Ginny Prewitt?" Potter asked, pen poised. "Did you see a lot of her?"

"Just in and out past the desk. She always said hullo and please and thank you, which is more'n a whole lotta these rich fuckers manage," said Wilson laconically. "Longest chat we ever had was about Jamaica. She was thinking of doing a job over there; asking me where tuh stay, what's it like. And I got her autograph for mi nephew, Jason, for his birthday. Got her to sign a card, sent it outta Afghanistan. Just three weeks before she died. She asked after Jason by name every time I saw her after that, and I liked the girl for that, y'know? I been knocking around the security game forra long time. There's people who'd expect you to take a bullet for them and they don't bother rememb'ring yuh name. Yeah, she was all right."

Potter's pie and mash arrived, steaming hot. The two men accorded it a moment's respectful silence as they contemplated the heaped plate. Mouth-watering, Potter picked up his knife and fork and said:

"Can you talk me through what happened the night Ginny died? She went out, what time?"

The security guard scratched his forearm thoughtfully, pushing up the sleeve of his sweatshirt; Potter saw tattoos there, crosses and initials.

"Musta bin just gone seven that evening. She was with her friend Daphne Greengrass. I remember, as they were going out the door, Mr. Longbottom come in. I remember that, because he said something to Ginny. I didn't hear what it was. She didn't like it, though. I could tell by the look on her face."

"What kind of look?"

"Offended," said Wilson, the answer ready. "So then I seen the two of them on the monitor, Ginny and Greengrass, getting in their car. We gotta camera over the door, see. It's linked to a monitor on the desk, so we can see who's buzzing to get in."

"Does it record footage? Can I see a tape?"

Wilson shook his head.

"Mr. Longbottom didn't want nothing like that on the door. No recording devices. He was the first to buy a flat, before they were all finished, so he had input into the arrangements."

"The camera's just a high-tech peephole, then?"

Wilson nodded. There was a fine scar running from just beneath his left eye to the middle of his cheekbone.

"Yeah. So I seen the girls get into their car. Colin, guy who's coming to meet us here, wasn't driving her that night. He was supposed ta be picking up Dean Thomas."

"Who was her chauffeur that night?"

"Guy called Dennis, from Execars. She'd had him before. I seen all the photographers crowdin' round the car as it pulled away. They'd been sniffin' around all week, because they knew she was back with Michael Corner."

"What did Longbottom do, once Ginny and Daphne had left?"

"He collected his post from me and went up the stairs to his flat." Potter was putting down his fork with every mouthful, to make notes. "Anyone go in or out after that?"

"Yeah, the caterers—they'd been up at the Longbottoms' because they were having guests that night. An American couple arrived just after eight and went up to Flat One, and nobody come in or out till they left again, near midnight. Didn't see no one else till Ginny come home, round half past one.

"I heard the paps shouting her name outside. Big crowd by that time. A bunch of them had followed her from the nightclub, and there was a load waiting there already, looking out for Dean Thomas. He was supposedta be getting there round half twelve. Ginny pressed the bell and I buzzed her in."

"She didn't punch the code into the keypad?"

"Not with them all around her; she wanted to get in quick. They were yelling, pressing in on her."

"Couldn't she have gone in through the underground car park and avoided them?"

"Yeah, she did that sometimes when Colin was with her, 'cause she'd given him a control for the electric doors to the garage. But Dennis didn't have one, so it had to be the front.

"I said good morning, and I asked about the snow, 'cause she had some in her hair; she was shivering, wearin' a skimpy little dress. She said it was way below freezing, something like that. Then she said, 'I wish they'd fuck off. Are they gonna stay there all night?' 'Bout the paps. I told her they were still waiting for Dean Thomas; he was late. She looked pissed off. Then she got in the lift and went up to her flat."

"She looked pissed off?" "Yeah, really pissed off."

"Suicidal pissed off?"

"No," said Wilson. "Angry pissed off." "Then what happened?"

"Then," said Wilson, "I had to go into the back room. My guts were starting to feel really bad. I needed the bathroom. Urgent, yuh know. I'd caught what Septimus had. He was off sick with his belly. I was away maybe fifteen minutes. No choice. Never had the shits like it.

"I was still in the can when the bawling started. No," he corrected himself, "first thing I heard was a bang. Big bang in the distance. I realized later, that must've been the body—Ginny, I mean—falling.

"_T__h__e__n_the bawlin' started, getting louder, coming down the stairs. So I pull up my pants and go running out into the lobby, and there's Mrs. Longbottom, shaking and screaming and acting like one mad bitch in her underwear. She says Ginny's dead, that she's been pushed off her balcony by a man in her flat.

"I tell her to stay where she is and I run out the front door. And there she was. Lyin' in the middle of the road, face down in the snow."

Wilson swigged his tea, and continued to cradle the mug in his large hand as he said:

"Half her head was caved in. Blood in the snow. I could tell her neck was

broken. And there was—yeah."

The sweet and unmistakable smell of human brains seemed to fill Potter's

nostrils. He had smelled it many times. You never forgot.

"I ran back inside," resumed Wilson. "Both the Longbottoms were in the lobby; he was tryin' to get her back upstairs, inna some clothes, and she was still bawling. I told them to call the police and to keep an eye on the lift, in case he tried to come down that way.

"I grabbed the master key out the back room and I ran upstairs. No one on the stairwell. I unlocked the door of Ginny's flat—"

"Didn't you think of taking anything with you, to defend yourself?" Potter interrupted. "If you thought there was someone in there? Someone who'd just killed a woman?"

There was a long pause, the longest so far.

"Didn't think I'd need nothing," said Wilson. "Thought I could take him, no

problem."

"Take who?"

"Corner," said Wilson quietly. "I thought Corner was up there." "Why?"

"I thought he musta come in while I was in the bathroom. He knew the key code. I thought he musta gone upstairs and she'd let him in. I'd heard them rowing before. I'd heard him angry. Yeah. I thought he'd pushed her.

"But when I got up to the flat, it was empty. I looked in every room and there

was no one there. I opened the wardrobes, even, but nothing.

"The windows in the lounge was wide open. It was below freezing that night. I didn't close them, I didn't touch nothing. I come out and pressed the button on the lift. The doors opened straight away; it was still at her floor. It was empty.

"I ran back downstairs. The Longbottoms were in their flat when I passed their door; I could hear them; she was still bawling and he was still shouting at her. I didn't know whether they'd called the police yet. I grabbed my mobile off the security desk and I went back out the front door, back to Ginny, because—well, I didn't like to leave her lying there alone. I was gonna call the police from the street, make sure they were coming. But I heard the siren before I'd even pressed nine. They were there quick."

"One of the Longbottoms had called them, had they?" "Yeah. He had. Two uniformed coppers in a panda car."

"OK," said Potter. "I want to be clear on this one point: you believed Mrs. Longbottom when she said she'd heard a man up in the top flat?"

"Oh yeah," said Wilson. "Why?"

Wilson frowned slightly, thinking, his eyes on the street over Potter's right

shoulder.

"She hadn't given you any details at this point, had she?" Potter asked. "Nothing about what she'd been doing when she heard this man? Nothing to explain why she was awake at two in the morning?"

"No," said Wilson. "She never gave me no explanation like that. It was the way she was acting, y'know. Hysterical. Shaking like a wet dog. She kept saying

'There's a man up there, he threw her over.' She was proper scared.

"But there was nobody there; I can swear that to you on the lives of mi kids. The flat was empty, the lift was empty, the stairwell was empty. If he was there, where did he go?"

"The police came," Potter said, returning mentally to the dark, snowy street, and the broken corpse. "What happened then?"

"When Mrs. Longbottom saw the police car out her window, she came straight back down in her dressing gown, with her husband running after her; she come out into the street, into the snow, and starts bawling at them that there's a murderer in the building.

"Lights are going on all over the place now. Faces at windows. Half the street's woken up. People coming out on to the pavements.

"One of the coppers stayed with the body, calling for back-up on his radio, while the other one went with us—me and the Longbottoms—back inside. He told them to go back in their flat and wait, and then he got me to show him the building. We went up to the top floor again; I opened up Ginny's door, showed him the flat, the open window. He checked the place over. I showed him the lift, still on her floor. We went back down the stairs. He asked about the middle flat, so I opened it up with the master key.

"It was dark, and the alarm went off when we went in. Before I could find the light switch or get to the alarm pad, the copper walked straight into the table in the middle of the hall and knocked over this massive vase of roses. Smashed and went everywhere, glass an' water an' flowers all over the floor. That caused a loada trouble, later…

"We checked the place. Empty, all the cupboards, every room. The windows were closed and bolTed. We went back to the lobby.

"Plainclothes police had arrived by this time. They wanted keys to the basement gym, the pool and the car park. One of 'em went off to take a statement from Mrs. Longbottom, another one was out front, calling for more back-up, because there are more neighbors coming out in the street now, and half of them are talking on the phone while they're standing there, and some of them are taking pictures. The uniformed coppers are trying to make them go back into their houses. It's snowing, really heavy snow…

"They got a tent up over the body when forensics arrived. The press arrived round the same time. The police taped off half the street, blocked it off with their cars."

Potter had cleaned his plate. He shoved it aside, ordered fresh mugs of tea for both of them and took up his pen again.

"How many people work at number eighteen?"

"There's three guards—me, Colin McLeod an' Ian Septimus. We work in shifts, someone always on duty, round the clock. I shoulda been off that night, but Septimus called me roundabout four in the afternoon, said he had this stomach bug,

felt really bad with it. So I said I'd stay on, work through the next shift. He'd swapped with me the previous month so I could sort out a bit of fambly business. I owed him.

"So it shouldn'ta been me there," said Wilson, and for a moment he sat in

silence, contemplating the way things should have been. "The other guards got on OK with Ginny, did they?" "Yeah, they'd tell yuh same as me. Nice girl." "Anyone else work there?"

"We gotta couple of Polish cleaners. They both got bad English. You won't get much outta them."

Wilson's testimony, Potter thought, as he scribbled into one of the SIB notebooks he had filched on one of his last visits to Aldershot, was of an unusually high quality: concise, precise and observant. Very few people answered the question they had been posed; even fewer knew how to organize their thoughts so that no follow-up questions were needed to prize information out of them. Potter was used to playing archaeologist among the ruins of people's traumatized memories; he had made himself the confidant of thugs; he had bullied the terrified, baited the dangerous and laid traps for the cunning. None of these skills were required with Wilson, who seemed almost wasted on a pointless trawl through Ronald Weasley's paranoia.

Nevertheless, Potter had an incurable habit of thoroughness. It would no more have occurred to him to skimp on the interview than to spend the day lying in his underpants on his camp bed, smoking. Both by inclination and by training, because he owed himself respect quite as much as the client, he proceeded with the meticulousness for which, in the army, he had been both feted and detested.

"Can we back up briefly and go through the day preceding her death? What

time did you arrive for work?"

"Nine, same as always. Took over from Colin."

"Do you keep a log of who goes in and out of the building?"

"Yeah, we sign everyone in and out, 'cept residents. There's a book at the desk."

"Can you remember who went in and out that day?"

Wilson hesitated.

"Ronald Weasley came to see his sister early that morning, didn't he?" prompted Potter. "But she'd told you not to let him up?"

"He's told you that, has he?" asked Wilson, looking faintly relieved. "Yeah, she did. But I felt sorry for the man, y'know? He had a contrac' to give back to her; he was worried about it, so I let him go up."

"Had anyone else come into the building that you know of?"

"Yeah, Lechsinka was already there. She's one of the cleaners. She always arrives at seven; she was mopping the stairwell when I got in. Nobody else came until the guy from the security comp'ny, to service the alarms. We get it done every six months. He musta come around nine forty; something like that."

"Was this someone you knew, the man from the security firm?"

"No, he was a new guy. Very young. They always send someone diff'rent. Missus Longbottom and Ginny were still at home, so I let him into the middle flat, and showed him where the control panel was an' got him started. Ginny went out while I was still in there, showin' the guy the fuse box an' the panic buttons."

"You saw her go out, did you?" "Yeah, she passed the open door." "Did she say hello?"

"No."

"You said she usually did?"

"I don't think she noticed me. She looked like she was in a hurry. She was going to see her sick mother."

"How d'you know, if she didn't speak to you?"

"Inquest," said Wilson succinctly. "After I'd shown the security guy where everything was, I went back downstairs, an' after Missus Longbottom went out, I let him into their flat to check that system too. He didn't need me tuh stay with him there; the positions of the fuse boxes and panic buttons are the same in all the flats."

"Where was Mr. Longbottom?"

"He'd already left for work. Eight he leaves, every day."

Three men in hard hats and fluorescent yellow jackets entered the café and sat at a neighboring table, newspapers under their arms, work boots clogged with filth.

"How long would you say you were away from the desk each time you were with the security guy?"

"Mebbe five minutes in the middle flat," said Wilson. "A minute each for the others."

"When did the security guy leave?"

"Late morning. I can't remember exactly." "But you're sure he left?"

"Oh yeah."

"Anyone else visit?"

"There was a few deliveries, but it was quiet compared to how the rest of the week had been."

"Earlier in the week had been busy, had it?"

"Yeah, we'd had a lot of coming and going, because of Dean Thomas arriving from LA. People from the production company were in and out of Flat Two, checking the place was set up for him, filling up the fridge and that."

"Can you remember what deliveries there were that day?"

"Packages for Thomas an' Ginny. An' roses—I helped the guy up with them, because they come in a massive," Wilson placed his large hands apart to show the size, "a huh-_uge_vase, and we set 'em up on a table in the hallway of Flat Two. That's the roses that got smashed."

"You said that caused trouble; what did you mean?"

"Mister Longbottom had sent them to Dean Thomas an' when he heard they'd been ruined he was pissed off. Shoutin' like a maniac."

"When was this?"

"While the police were there. When they were trying to interview his wife."

"A woman had just fallen to her death past his front windows, and he was upset that someone had wrecked his flowers?"

"Yeah," said Wilson, with a slight shrug. "He's like that." "Does he know Dean Thomas?"

Wilson shrugged again.

"Did this rapper ever come to the flat?"

Wilson shook his head.

"After we had all this trouble, he went to a hotel."

"How long were you away from the desk when you helped put the roses in

Flat Two?"

"Mebbe five minutes; ten at most. After that, I was on the desk all day." "You mentioned packages for Thomas and Ginny."

"Yeah, from some designer, but I gave them to Lechsinka to put in the flats. It was clothes for him an' handbags for her."

"And as far as you're aware, everyone who went in that day went out again?" "Oh yeah," said Wilson. "All logged in the book at the front desk."

"How often is the code on the external keypad changed?"

"It's been changed since she died, because half the Met knew it by the time they were finished," said Wilson. "But it din change the three months Ginny lived there."

"D'you mind telling me what it was?" "Nineteen sixty-six," said Wilson.

" 'They think it's all over'?"

"Yeah," said Wilson. "McLeod was always bellyaching about it. Wanted it changed."

"How many people d'you think knew the door code before Ginny died?"

"Not that many."

"Delivery men? Postmen? Bloke who reads the gas meter?"

"People like that are always buzzed in by us, from the desk. The residents don't normally use the keypad, because we can see them on camera, so we open the door for them. The keypad's only there in case there's no one on the desk; sometimes we'd be in the back room, or helping with something upstairs."

"And the flats all have individual keys?" "Yeah, and individual alarm systems." "Was Ginny's set?"

"No."

"What about the pool and the gym? Are they alarmed?"

"Jus' keys. Everyone who lives in the building gets a set of pool and gym keys along with their flat keys. And one key to the door leading to the underground car park. That door's got an alarm on it."

"Was it set?"

"Dunno, I wasn't there when they checked that one. It shoulda been. The guy from the security firm had checked all the alarms that morning."

"Were all these doors locked that night?"

Wilson hesitated.

"Not all of them. The door to the pool was open." "Had anyone used it that day, do you know?"

"I can't remember anyone using it." "So how long had it been open?"

"I dunno. Colin was on the previous night. He shoulda checked it."

"OK," said Potter. "You said you thought the man Mrs. Longbottom had heard was Corner, because you'd heard them arguing previously. When was that?"

"Not long before they split, 'bout two months before she died. She'd thrown him out of her flat and he was hammerin' on the door and kicking it, trying to break it down, calling her filthy names. I went upstairs to get him out."

"Did you use force?"

"Didn't need to. When he saw me coming he picked up his stuff—she'd thrown his jacket and his shoes out after him—and just walked out past me. He was stoned," said Wilson. "Glassy eyes, y'know. Sweating. Filthy T-shirt with crap all down it. I never knew what the fuck she saw in him.

"And here's Colin," he added, his tone lightening. "Ginny's driver."

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: THIS BOOK HAS BEEN ADAPTED FROM "THE CUCKOO'S CALLING" BY ROBERT GALBRAITH. BEFORE ANYBODY ACCUSES ME OF PLAGIARISM LET ME TELL YOU THAT TAKING IDEAS FROM BOOKS NOT PUBLISHED IN FANFICTION IS NOT AGAINST THE RULES.**


	11. Chapter 11

A MAN IN HIS MID-TWENTIES was edging his way into the tiny café. He was short, slight and extravagantly good-looking.

"Hey, Tom," he said, and the driver and security guard exchanged a dap greeting, gripping each other's hands and bumping knuckles, before Creevy took his seat beside Wilson.

A masterpiece produced by an indecipherable cocktail of races, Creevy's skin was an olive-bronze, his cheekbones chiseled, his nose slightly aquiline, his black-lashed eyes a dark hazel, his straight hair slicked back off his face. His startling looks were thrown into relief by the conservative shirt and tie he wore, and his smile was consciously modest, as though he sought to disarm other men, and preempt their resentment.

"Where'sa car?" asked Tom.

"Electric Lane." Creevy pointed with his thumb over his shoulder. "I got maybe twenty minutes. Gotta be back at the West End by four. Howya doing?" he added, holding out his hand to Potter, who shook it. "Colin Creevy. You're…?"

"Harry Potter. Tom says you've got—"

"Yeah, yeah," said Creevy. "I dunno whether it matters, probably not, but the police didn't give a shit. I just wanna know I've told someone, right? I'm not saying it wasn't suicide, you understand," he added. "I'm just saying I'd like this thing cleared up. Coffee, please, love," he added to the middle-aged waitress, who remained impassive, impervious to his charm.

"What's worrying you?" Potter asked.

"I always drove her, right?" said Creevy, launching into his story in a

way that told Potter he had rehearsed it. "She always asked for me." "Did she have a contract with your company?"

"Yeah. Well…"

"It's run through the front desk," said Tom. "One of the services provided. If anyone wants a car, we call Execars, Colin's company."

"Yeah, but she always asked for me," Creevy reiterated firmly.

"You got on with her, did you?"

"Yeah, we got on good," said Creevy. "We'd got—you know—I'm not saying close—well, close, yeah, kinda. We were friendly; the relationship had gone beyond driver and client, right?"

"Yeah? How far beyond?"

"Nah, nothing like that," said Creevy, with a grin. "Nothing like that."

But Potter saw that the driver was not at all displeased that the idea had been mooted, that it had been thought plausible.

"I'd been driving her for a year. We talked a lot, y'know. Had a lot in

common. Similar backgrounds, y'know?" "In what way?"

"Mixed race," said Creevy. "And things were a bit dysfunctional in my family, right, so I knew where she was coming from. She didn't know that many people like her, not once she got famous. Not to talk to properly."

"Being mixed race was an issue for her, was it?"

"Growing up freckly in a white pale faced family, what d'you think?"

"And you had a similar childhood?"

"Me father's half West Indian, half Welsh; me mother's half Scouse, half Greek. Ginny usedta say she envied me," he said, sitting up a little straighter. "She said, 'You know where you come from, even if it is bloody everywhere.' And on my birthday, right," he added, as though he had not yet sufficiently impressed upon Potter something which he felt was important, "she give me this Draco Malfoy jacket that was worth, like, nine hundred quid."

Evidently expected to show a reaction, Potter nodded, wondering whether Creevy had come along simply to tell somebody how close he had been to Ginny Prewitt. Satisfied, the driver went on:

"So, right, the day she died—day before, I should say—I drove her to her mum's in the morning, right? And she was not happy. She never liked going to see her mother."

"Why not?"

"Because that woman's fucking weird," said Creevy. "I drove them both out for a day, once, I think it was the mother's birthday. She's fucking creepy, Lady Molly Weasley. _D__a__rl__i__ng,__my__darling_to Ginny, every other word. She used to hang off her. Just fucking strange and possessive and over the top, right?

"Anyway, that day, right, her mum had just got out of hospital, so that wasn't gonna be fun, was it? Ginny wasn't looking forward to seeing her. She was uptight like I hadn't seen her before.

"And then I told her I couldn't drive her that night, because I was booked for

Dean Thomas, and she wasn't happy about that, neither."

"Why not?"

" 'Cause she liked me driving her, didn't she?" said Creevy, as though Potter was being obtuse. "I used to help her out with the paps and stuff, do a bit of bodyguard stuff to get her in and out of places."

By the merest flicker of his facial muscles, Wilson managed to convey what he thought of the suggestion that Creevy was bodyguard material.

"Couldn't you have swapped with another driver, and driven her instead of

Thomas?"

"I coulda, but I didn't want to," Creevy confessed. "I'm a big Dean fan. Wanted to meet him. That's what Ginny was pissed off about. Anyway," he hurried on, "I took her to her mum's, and waited, and then, this is the bit I wanted to tell you about, right?

"She come out of her mother's place and she was strange. Not like I'd ever seen her, right? Quiet, really quiet. Like she was in shock or something. Then she asked me for a pen, and she started scribbling something on a bit of blue paper. Wasn't talking to me. Wasn't saying anything. Just writing.

"So, I drove her to Vashti, 'cause she was supposed ta be meeting her friend

there for lunch, right—"

"What's Vashti? What friend?"

"Vashti—it's this shop—boutique, they call it. There's a café in it. Trendy place. And the friend was…" Creevy clicked his fingers repeatedly, frowning. "She was that friend she'd made when she was in hospital for her mental problems. What was her fucking name? I used to drive the two of them around. Christ…Ruby? Roxy? Luna? Something like that. She was living at the St. Elmo hostel in Hammersmith. She was homeless.

"Anyway, Ginny goes into the shop, right, and she'd told me on the way to her mother's she was gonna have lunch there, right, but she's only in there a quarter of an hour or something, then she comes out alone and tells me to drive her home. So that was a bit fucking strange, right? And Luna, or whatever her name is—it'll come back to me—wasn't with her. We used ta give Luna a lift home normally, when they'd been out together. And the blue piece of paper was gone. And Ginny never said a word to me all the way back home."

"Did you mention this blue paper to the police?"

"Yeah. They didn't think it was worth shit," said Creevy. "Said it was probably a shopping list."

"Can you remember what it looked like?"

"It was just blue. Like airmail paper."

He looked down at his watch.

"I gotta go in ten."

He picked at the corner of a fingernail.

"What was your first thought, when you heard she was dead?"

"I dunno," said Creevy, chewing at the hangnail he had been picking. "I was fucking shocked. You don't expect that, do you? Not when you've just seen someone hours before. The press were all saying it was Corner, because they'd had a row in that nightclub and stuff. I thought it might've been him, to tell you the truth. Bastard."

"You knew him, did you?"

"I drove them a coupla times," said Creevy. A flaring of his nostrils, a tightness around the lines of his mouth, together suggested a bad smell.

"What did you think of him?"

"I thought he was a talentless tosser." With unexpected virtuosity, he suddenly adopted a flat, drawling voice: _"__Are we__gonna__n__e__e__d__him__la__t__e__r Gin-Gin?__H__e__'__d__b__e__t__t__e__r wai__t__,__ye__ah?"_said Creevy, crackling with temper. "Never once spoke to me directly. Ignorant, sponging piece of shit."

Tom said, sotto voce, "Colin's an actor." "Just bit parts," said Creevy. "So far."

And he digressed into a brief exposition of the television dramas in which he had appeared, exhibiting, in Potter's estimation, a marked desire to be considered more than he felt himself to be; to become endowed, in fact, with that unpredictable, dangerous and transformative quality: fame. To have had it so often in the back of his car and not yet to have caught it from his passengers must (thought Potter) have been tantalizing and, perhaps, infuriating.

"Colin auditioned for Neville Longbottom," said Wilson. "Didn't you?"

"Yeah," said Creevy, with a lack of enthusiasm that told the outcome plainly.

"How did that come about?" asked Potter.

"Usual way," said Creevy, with a hint of hauteur. "Through my agent."

"Nothing came of it?"

"They decided to go in another direction," said Creevy. "They wrote out the part."

"OK, so you picked up Dean Thomas from, where—Heathrow?—that night?" "Terminal Five, yeah," said Creevy, apparently brought back to a sense

of mundane reality, and glancing at his watch. "Listen, I'd better get going."

"All right if I walk you back to the car?" asked Potter.

Wilson showed himself happy to go along too; Potter paid the bill for all three of them and they left. Out on the pavement, Potter offered both his companions cigarettes; Wilson declined, Creevy accepted.

A silver Mercedes was parked a short distance away, around the corner in

Electric Lane.

"Where did you take Dean when he arrived?" Potter asked Creevy, as they approached the car.

"He wanted a club, so I took him to Barrack." "What time did you get him there?"

"I dunno…half eleven? Quarter to twelve? He was wired. Didn't want to sleep, he said."

"Why Barrack?"

"Friday night at Barrack's best hip-hop night in London," said Creevy,

on a slight laugh, as though this was common knowledge. "And he musta liked it,

'cause it was gone three by the time he came out again."

"So did you drive him to Kentigern Gardens and find the police there, or…?" "I'd already heard on the car radio what had happened," said Creevy.

"I told Dean when he got back to the car. His entourage all started making phone calls, waking up people at the record company, trying to make other arrangements. They got him a suite at Claridges; I drove him there. I didn't get home till gone five. Switched on the news and watched it all on Sky. Fucking unbelievable."

"I've been wondering who let the paparazzi staking out number eighteen know that Dean wasn't going to be there for hours. Someone tipped them off; that's why they'd left the street before Ginny fell."

"Yeah? I dunno," said Creevy.

He increased his pace very slightly, reaching the car ahead of the other two and unlocking it.

"Didn't Thomas have a load of luggage with him? Was it in the car with you?" "Nah, it'd all been sent ahead by the record company days before. He got off

the plane with just a carry-on bag—and about ten security people."

"So you weren't the only car sent for him?"

"There were four cars—but Dean himself was with me." "Where did you wait for him, while he was in the nightclub?"

"I just parked the car and waited," said Creevy. "Just off Glasshouse

Street."

"With the other three cars? Were you all together?"

"You don't find four parking spaces side by side in the middle of London,

mate," said Creevy. "I dunno where the others were parked."

Still holding the driver's door open, he glanced at Wilson, then back at Potter. "How's any of this matter?" he demanded.

"I'm just interested," said Potter, "in how it works, when you're with a client."

"It's fucking tedious," said Creevy, with a sudden flash of irritation,

"that's what it is. Driving's mostly waiting around."

"Have you still got the control for the doors to the underground garage that

Ginny gave you?" Potter asked.

"What?" said Creevy, although Potter would have taken an oath that the driver had heard him. The flicker of animosity was undisguised now, and it seemed to extend not only to Potter, but also to Wilson, who had listened without comment since noting aloud that Creevy was an actor.

"Have you still got—"

"Yeah, I've still got it. I still drive Mr. Longbottom, don't I?" said Creevy.

"Right, I gotta go. See ya, Tom."

He threw his half-smoked cigarette into the road and got into the car.

"If you remember anything else," said Potter, "like the name of the friend Ginny was meeting in Vashti, will you give me a call?"

He handed Creevy a card. The driver, already pulling on his seat belt, took it without looking at it.

"I'm gonna be late."

Wilson raised his hand in farewell. Creevy slammed the car door, revved the engine and reversed out of the parking space, scowling.

"He's a bit of a star-fucker," said Wilson, as the car pulled away. It was a kind of apology for the younger man. "He loved drivin' her. He tries to drive all the famous ones. He's been hoping Longbottom'll cast him in something for two years. He was well pissed off when he didn't get that part."

"What was it?"

"Drug dealer. Some film."

They walked off together in the direction of Brixton underground station, past a gaggle of black schoolgirls in uniforms with blue plaid skirts. One girl's long beaded hair made Potter think, again, of his sister, Lucy.

"Longbottom's still living at number eighteen, is he?" asked Potter.

"Oh yeah," said Wilson.

"What about the other two flats?"

"There's a Ukrainian commodities broker and his wife renting Flat Two now. Got a Russian interested in Three, but he hasn't made an offer yet."

"Is there any chance," asked Potter, as they were momentarily impeded by a tiny hooded, bearded man like an Old Testament prophet, who stopped in front of them and slowly stuck out his tongue, "that I could come and have a look inside sometime?"

"Yeah, all right," said Wilson after a pause in which his gaze slid furtively over Potter's lower legs. "Buzz mi. But it'll have to be when Longbottom's out, y'understand. He's one quarrelsome man, and I need my job."


	12. Chapter 12

THE KNOWLEDGE THAT HE WOULD be sharing his office again on Monday added piquancy to Potter's weekend solitude, rendering it less irksome, more valuable. The camp bed could stay out; the door between inner and outer offices could remain open; he was able to attend to bodily functions without fear of causing offense. Sick of the smell of artificial limes, he managed to force open the painted-shut window behind his desk, which allowed a cold, clean breeze to wipe the fusty corners of the two small rooms. Avoiding every CD, every track, that transported him back to those excruciating, exhilarating periods he had shared with Astoria, he selected Bryan Adams to play loudly on the small CD player he had thought he would never see again, and which he had found at the bottom of one of the boxes he had brought from Astoria's. He busied himself setting up his portable television, with its paltry indoor aerial; he loaded his worn clothes into a black bin bag and walked to a launderette half a mile away; back at the office, he hung up his shirts and underwear on a rope he slung across one side of the inner office, then watched the three o'clock match between Arsenal and Spurs.

Through all these mundane acts, he felt as though he was accompanied by the specter that had haunted him during his months in hospital. It lurked in the corners of his shabby office; he could hear it whispering to him whenever his attention on the task in hand grew slack. It urged him to consider how far he had fallen; his age; his penury; his shattered love life; his homelessness. _T__hir__t__y__-__f__i__ve__,_it whispered, _and __noth__i__ng __to __show for __all __y__our __ye__ars __of __graft __exce__pt __a __f__e__w __c__ardboard__bo__xe__s__and__a__massive__d__e__bt._The specter directed his eyes to cans of beer in the supermarket, where he bought more Pot Noodles; it mocked him as he ironed shirts on the floor. As the day wore on, it jeered at him for his self- imposed habit of smoking outside in the street, as though he were still in the army, as though this petty self-discipline could impose form and order on the amorphous, disastrous present. He began to smoke at his desk, with the butts mounting in a cheap tin ashtray he had swiped, long ago, from a bar in Germany.

But he had a job, he kept reminding himself; a paid job. Arsenal beat Spurs, and Potter was cheered; he turned off the television and, defying the specter, moved straight to his desk and resumed work.

At liberty, now, to collect and collate evidence in whatever way he chose, Potter continued to conform to the protocols of the Criminal Procedure and Investigation Act. The fact that he believed himself to be hunting a figment of Ronald Weasley's disturbed imagination made no difference to the thoroughness and accuracy with which he now wrote up the notes he had made during his interviews with Weasley, Wilson and Creevy.

Lucy telephoned him at six in the evening, while he was hard at work. Though his sister was younger than Potter by two years, she seemed to feel herself older.

Weighed down, young, by a mortgage, a stolid husband, three children and an onerous job, Lucy seemed to crave responsibility, as though she could never have enough anchors. Potter had always suspected that she wanted to prove to herself and the world that she was nothing like their fly-by-night mother, who had dragged the two of them all over the country, from school to school, house to squat to camp, in pursuit of the next enthusiasm or man. Lucy was the only one of his eight half-siblings with whom Potter had shared a childhood; he was fonder of her than of almost anyone else in his life, and yet their interactions were often unsatisfactory, laden with familiar anxieties and arguments. Lucy could not disguise the fact that her brother worried and disappointed her. In consequence, Potter was less inclined to be honest with her about his present situation than he would have been with many a friend.

"Yeah, it's going great," he told her, smoking at the open window, watching people drift in and out of the shops below. "Business has doubled lately."

"Where are you? I can hear traffic."

"At the office. I've got paperwork to do."

"On Saturday? How does Astoria feel about that?" "She's away; she's gone to visit her mother."

"How are things going between you?" "Great," he said.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah, I'm sure. How's Greg?"

She gave him a brief precis of her husband's workload, then returned to the

attack.

"Is Gillespie still on your back for repayment?" "No."

"Because you know what, Greeny"—the childhood nickname boded ill: she was trying to soften him up—"I've been looking into this, and you could apply to the British Legion for—"

"Fucking hell, Lucy," he said, before he could stop himself. "What?"

The hurt and indignation in her voice were only too familiar: he closed his eyes.

"I don't need help from the British Legion, Luce, all right?" "There's no need to be so _proud_…"

"How are the boys?"

"They're fine. Look, Greeny, I just think it's outrageous that James Potter is getting his lawyer to hassle you, when he's never given you a penny in his life. He ought to have made it a gift, seeing what you've been through and how much he's—"

"Business is good. I'm going to pay off the loan," said Potter. A teenaged

couple on the corner of the street were having an argument.

"Are you _su__r__e _everything's all right between you and Astoria? Why's she visiting her mother? I thought they hated each other?"

"They're getting on better these days," he said, as the teenage girl gesticulated

wildly, stamped her foot and walked away.

"Have you bought her a ring yet?" asked Lucy.

"I thought you wanted me to get Gillespie off my back?" "Is she all right about not having a ring?"

"She's been great about it," said Potter. "She says she doesn't want one; she wants me to put all my money into the business."

"Really?" said Lucy. She always seemed to think that she made a good job of dissimulating her deep dislike of Astoria. "Are you going to come to Jack's birthday party?"

"When is it?"

"I sent you an invitation over a week ago, Greeny!"

He wondered whether Astoria had slipped it into one of the boxes he had left unpacked on the landing, not having room for all his possessions in the office.

"Yeah, I'll be there," he said; there was little he wanted to do less.

The call terminated, he returned to his computer and continued work. His notes from the Wilson and Creevy interviews were soon completed, but a sense of frustration persisted. This was the first case that he had taken since leaving the army that required more than surveillance work, and it might have been designed to remind him daily that he had been stripped of all power and authority. Film producer Neville Longbottom, the man who had been in closest proximity to Ginny Prewitt at the time of her death, remained unreachable behind his faceless minions, and, in spite of Ronald Weasley's confident assertion that he

would be able to persuade her to talk to Potter, there was not yet a secured interview with Hannah Longbottom.

With a faint sense of impotence, and with almost as much contempt for the occupation as Hermione's fiancé felt for it, Potter fought off his lowering sense of gloom by resorting to more internet searches connected with the case. He found Colin Creevy online: the driver had been telling the truth about the episode of _T__he__Bill_in which he had had two lines (Gang Member Two…Colin Creevy). He had a theatrical agent, too, whose website featured a small photograph of Colin, and a short list of credits including walk-on parts in _Ea__s__t End__e__rs_and _Casualty._Colin's photograph on the Execars home page was much larger. Here, he stood alone in a peaked hat and uniform, looking like a film star, evidently the handsomest driver on their books.

Evening shaded into night beyond the windows; while Bryan Adams growled and moaned from the portable CD player in the corner, Potter chased the shadow of Ginny Prewitt across cyberspace, occasionally adding to the notes he had already taken while speaking to Weasley, Wilson and Creevy.

He could find no Facebook page for Prewitt, nor did she ever seem to have joined Twitter. Her refusal to feed her fans' ravenous appetite for personal information seemed to have inspired others to fill the void. There were countless websites dedicated to the reproduction of her pictures, and to obsessive commentary on her life. If half of the information here was factual, Weasley had given Potter but a partial and sanitized version of his sister's drive towards self- destruction, a tendency which seemed to have revealed itself first in early adolescence, when her adoptive father, Sir Arthur Weasley, a genial-looking bearded man who had founded his own electronics company, Albris, had dropped dead of a heart attack. Ginny had subsequently run away from two schools, and been expelled from a third, all of them expensive private establishments. She had slit her own wrist and been found in a pool of blood by a dormitory friend; she had lived rough, and been tracked to a squat by the police. A fan site called GinnyMyInspirationForeva.com, run by a person of unknown sex, asserted that the model had briefly supported herself, during this time, as a prostitute.

Then had come sectioning under the Mental Health Act, the secure ward for young people with severe illnesses, and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Barely a year later, while shopping in a clothing store on Oxford Street with her mother, there had come the fairy-tale approach from a scout for a modeling agency.

Prewitt's early photographs showed a sixteen-year-old with the face of Nefertiti, who managed to project to the lens an extraordinary combination of worldliness and vulnerability, with long thin legs like a giraffe's and a jagged scar running down the inside of her left arm that fashion editors seemed to have found an interesting adjunct to her spectacular face, for it was sometimes given prominence in photographs. Ginny's extreme beauty was on the very edge of

absurdity, and the charm for which she was celebrated (in both newspaper obituaries and hysterical blogs) sat alongside a reputation for sudden outbursts of temper and a dangerously short fuse. Press and public seemed to have both loved her, and loved loathing her. One female journalist found her "strangely sweet, possessed of an unexpected naiveté"; another, "at bottom, a calculating little diva, shrewd and tough."

At nine o'clock Potter walked to Chinatown and bought himself a meal; then he returned to the office, swapped Bryan Adams for Akon, and searched out online accounts of Michael Corner, the man who, by common consent, even that of Weasley, had not killed his girlfriend.

Until Colin Creevy had displayed professional jealousy, Potter could not have said why Corner was famous. He now discovered that Corner had been elevated from obscurity by his participation in a critically acclaimed independent film, in which he had played a character indistinguishable from himself: a heroin-addicted musician stealing to support his habit.

Corner's band had released a well-reviewed album on the back of their lead singer's newfound fame, and split up in considerable acrimony around the time that he had met Ginny. Like his girlfriend, Corner was extraordinarily photogenic, even in the unretouched long-lens photographs of him sloping along a street in filthy clothes, even in those shots (and there were several) where he was lunging in fury at photographers. The conjunction of these two damaged and beautiful people seemed to have supercharged the fascination with both; each reflecting more interest on to the other, which rebounded on themselves; it was a kind of perpetual motion.

The death of his girlfriend had fixed Corner more securely than ever in that firmament of the idolized, the vilified, the deified. A certain darkness, a fatalism, hung around him; both his most fervent admirers and his detractors seemed to take pleasure in the idea that he had one booted foot in the afterworld already; that there was an inevitability about his descent into despair and oblivion. He seemed to make a veritable parade of his frailties, and Potter lingered for some minutes over another of those tiny, jerky YouTube videos, in which Corner, patently stoned, talked on and on, in the voice Creevy had so accurately parodied, about dying being no more than checking out of the party, and making a confused case for there being little need to cry if you had to leave early.

On the night that Ginny had died, according to a multitude of sources, Corner had left the nightclub shortly after his girlfriend, wearing—and Potter found it hard to see this as anything other than deliberate showmanship—a wolf's mask. His account of what he had got up to for the rest of the night might not have satisfied online conspiracy theorists, but the police seemed to have been convinced that he had had nothing to do with subsequent events at Kentigern Gardens.

Potter followed the speculative train of his own thoughts over the rough terrain of news sites and blogs. Here and there he stumbled upon pockets of feverish speculation, of theories about Prewitt's death that mentioned clues the police had failed to follow up, and which seemed to have fed Weasley's own conviction that there had been a murderer. GinnyMyInspirationForeva had a long list of Unanswered Questions, which included, at number five, _"__W__ho__c__al__l__e__d off__t__he__paps b__e__fore__she__fell?__"_; at number nine, _"__W__hy__did__th__e__m__e__n__wi__t__h__the__c__o__v__e__r__e__d__fac__e__s runnin__away__from__h__e__r__f__l__at__at__2__a.m.__n__eve__r__c__ome__for__w__ard?__W__h__e__r__e__are__they__and who__w__e__re__the__y__?__"_; and at number thirteen, _"__W__hy__was__Ginny__w__e__aring__a__di__f__fer__e__nt out__f__it__to __t__he__one__she __c__ame__home__in __w__h__e__n she__fell __o__ff__the bal__c__on__y__?"_

Midnight found Potter drinking a can of lager and reading about the posthumous controversy that Weasley had mentioned, of which he had been vaguely aware while it unfolded, without being very interested. A furor had sprung up, a week after the inquest had returned a verdict of suicide, around the advertising shot for the wares of designer Draco Malfoy. It featured two models posing in a dirty alleyway, naked except for strategically placed handbags, scarves and jewels. Prewitt was perched on a dustbin, Daphne Greengrass sprawled on the ground. Both wore huge curving angel's wings: Greengrass's a swan-like white; Prewitt's a greenish black fading to glossy bronze.

Potter stared at the picture for minutes, trying to analyze precisely why the dead girl's face drew the eye so irresistibly, how she managed to dominate the picture. Somehow she made the incongruity, the staginess of it, believable; she really did look as though she had been slung from heaven because she was too venal, because she so coveted the accessories she was clutching to herself. Daphne Greengrass, in all her alabaster beauty, became nothing but a counterpoint; in her pallor and her passivity, she looked like a statue.

The designer, Draco Malfoy, had drawn much criticism upon himself, some of it vicious, for choosing to use the picture. Many people felt that he was capitalizing on Prewitt's recent death, and sneered at the professions of deep affection for Prewitt that Malfoy's spokesman made on his behalf. GinnyMyInspirationForeva, however, asserted that Ginny would have wanted the picture to be used; that she and Draco Malfoy had been bosom friends: _Ginny__lov__e__d__Draco__l__i__k__e__a__broth__e__r__and__wou__l__d want__him__to__pay th__i__s__f__i__n__al__tr__i__bute__to__h__e__r__work__and__h__e__r__b__e__auty.__ T__his__is__ a__n__iconic shot__that__wi__l__l l__i__v__e__fore__ve__r__and__wi__l__l__c__ont__i__nue__to__ke__e__p__Ginny__al__i__v__e__in__t__he__m__e__m__o__ries__of we__who lov__e__d h__e__r._

Potter drank the last of his lager and contemplated the final four words of this sentence. He had never been able to understand the assumption of intimacy fans felt with those they had never met. People had sometimes referred to his father as "Old Jamie" in his presence, beaming, as if they were talking about a mutual friend, repeating well-worn press stories and anecdotes as though they had been

personally involved. A man in a pub in Trescothick had once said to Potter: "Fuck, I know your old man better than you do!" because he was able to name the session musician who had played on the Deadbeats' biggest album, and whose tooth James had famously broken when he slapped the end of his saxophone in anger.

It was one in the morning. Potter had become almost deaf to the constant muffled thuds of the bass guitar from two floors below, and to the occasional creaks and hisses from the attic flat above, where the bar manager enjoyed luxuries like showers and home-cooked food. Tired, but not yet ready to climb into his sleeping bag, he managed to discover Draco Malfoy's approximate address by further perusal of the internet, and noted the close proximity of Charles Street to Kentigern Gardens. Then he typed in the web address www.arrse.co.uk, like a man turning automatically into his local after a long shift at work.

He had not visited the Army Rumor Service site since Astoria had found him, months previously, browsing it on his computer, and had reacted the way other women might had they found their partners viewing online porn. There had been a row, generated by what she took to be his hankering for his old life and his dissatisfaction with the new.

Here was the army mindset in its every particular, written in the language he too could speak fluently. Here were the acronyms he had known by heart; the jokes impenetrable to outsiders; every concern of service life, from the father whose son was being bullied at his school in Cyprus, to retrospective abuse of the Prime Minister's performance at the Chilcot Inquiry. Potter wandered from post to post, occasionally snorting in amusement, yet aware all the time that he was lowering his resistance to the specter he could feel, now, breathing on the back of his neck.

This had been his world and he had been happy there. For all the inconveniences and hardships of military life, for all that he had emerged from the army minus half his leg, he did not regret a day of the time he had spent serving. And yet, he had not been of these people, even while among them. He had been a monkey, and then a suit, feared and disliked about equally by the average squaddie.

_If__eve__r__the__S__I__B__ta__l__k__to__y__ou,__y__ou__should__say__ "__No __c__om__me__nt,__I__want__a__la__w__ye__r." Alternat__i__ve__ly, a simple "__T__hank__ y__ou for not__i__c__ing m__e__"__wi__l__l su__f__f__ic__e__._

Potter gave a final grunt of laughter, and then, abruptly, shut down the site and turned off the computer. He was so tired that the removal of his prosthesis took twice the time it usually did.


	13. Chapter 13

ON SUNDAY MORNING, WHICH WAS fine, Potter headed back to the ULU to shower. Once again, by consciously filling out his own bulk and allowing his features to slide, as they did naturally, into a scowl, he made himself sufficiently intimidating to repel challenges as he marched, eyes down, past the desk. He hung around the changing rooms, waiting for a quiet moment so that he would not have to shower in full view of any of the changing students, for the sight of his false leg was a distinguishing feature he did not want to impress on anybody's memory.

Clean and shaven, he caught the Tube to Hammersmith Broadway, enjoying the tentative sunshine gleaming through the glass-covered shopping precinct through which he emerged on to the street. The distant shops on King Street were heaving with people; it might have been a Saturday. This was a bustling and essentially soulless commercial center, and yet Potter knew it to be a bare ten minutes' walk to a sleepy, countrified stretch of the Thames embankment.

While he walked, traffic rumbling past him, he remembered Sundays in Cornwall in his childhood, when everything closed down except the church and the beach. Sunday had had a particular flavor in those days; an echoing, whispering quiet, the gentle chink of china and the smell of gravy, the TV as dull as the empty high street, and the relentless rush of the waves on the beach when he and Lucy had run down on to the shingle, forced back on to primitive resources.

His mother had once said to him: "If Joan's right, and I end up in hell, it'll be

eternal Sunday in bloody St. Mawes."

Potter, who was heading away from the commercial center towards the

Thames, phoned his client as he walked.

"Ronald Weasley?"

"Yeah, sorry to disturb you at the weekend, Ronald…"

"Harry?" said Weasley, immediately friendly. "Not a problem, not a

problem at all! How did it go with Wilson?"

"Very good, very useful, thanks. I wanted to know whether you can help me find a friend of Ginny's. It's a girl she met in therapy. Her Christian name begins with an R—something like Rachel or Raquelle—and she was living at the St. Elmo hostel in Hammersmith when Ginny died. Does that ring any bells?"

There was a moment's silence. When Weasley spoke again, the disappointment

in his voice verged on annoyance.

"What do you want to speak to _h__e__r_for? Hannah's quite clear that the voice she heard from upstairs was male."

"I'm not interested in this girl as a suspect, but as a witness. Ginny had an appointment to meet her at a shop, Vashti, right after she saw you at your mother's flat."

"Yeah, I know; that came out at the inquest. I mean—well, of course, you know your job, but—I don't really see how she would know anything about what happened that night. Listen—wait a moment, Harry…I'm at my mother's and there are other people here…need to find a quieter spot…"

Potter heard the sounds of movement, a murmured "Excuse me," and Weasley

came back on the line.

"Sorry, I didn't want to say all this in front of the nurse. Actually, I thought, when you rang, you might be someone else calling up to talk to me about Corner. Everybody I know has rung to tell me."

"Tell you what?"

"You obviously don't read the _N__e__ws__of__the__W__orl__d__._It's all there, complete with pictures: Corner turned up to visit my mother yesterday, out of the blue. Photographers outside the house; it caused a lot of inconvenience and upset with the neighbors. I was out with Lavender, or I'd never have let him in."

"What did he want?"

"Good question. Gideon, my uncle, thinks it was money—but Gideon usually thinks people are after money; anyway, I've got power of attorney, so there was nothing doing there. God knows why he came. The one small mercy is that Mum doesn't seem to have realized who he is. She's on immensely strong painkillers."

"How did the press find out he was coming?"

"That," said Weasley, "is an excellent question. Gideon thinks he phoned them himself."

"How is your mother?"

"Poorly, very poorly. They say she could hang on for weeks, or—or it could

happen at any moment."

"I'm sorry to hear that," said Potter. He raised his voice as he passed underneath a flyover, across which traffic was moving noisily. "Well, if you do happen to remember the name of Ginny's Vashti friend…"

"I'm afraid I still don't really understand why you're so interested in her."

"Ginny made this girl travel all the way from Hammersmith to Notting Hill, spent fifteen minutes with her and then walked out. Why didn't she stay? Why meet for such a short space of time? Did they argue? Anything out of the ordinary that happens around a sudden death could be relMichaelt."

"I see," said Weasley hesitantly. "But…well, that sort of behavior wasn't really out of the ordinary for Ginny. I did tell you that she could be a bit…a bit selfish. It would be like her to think that a token appearance would keep the girl happy. She often had these brief enthusiasms for people, you know, and then dropped them."

His disappointment at Potter's chosen line of inquiry was so evident that the detective felt it might be politic to slip in a little covert justification of the immense fee his client was paying.

"The other reason I was calling was to let you know that tomorrow evening I'm meeting one of the CID officers who covered the case. Gilderoy Lockhart. I'm hoping to get hold of the police file."

"Fantastic!" Weasley sounded impressed. "That's quick work!" "Yeah, well, I've got good contacts in the Met."

"Then you'll be able to get some answers about the Runner! You've read my notes?"

"Yeah, very useful," said Potter.

"And I'm trying to fix up a lunch with Hannah Longbottom this week, so you can meet her and hear her testimony first hand. I'll ring your secretary, shall I?" "Great."

There was this to be said for having an underworked secretary he could not afford, Potter thought, once he had rung off: it gave a professional impression.

St. Elmo's Hostel for the Homeless turned out to be situated right behind the noisy concrete flyover. A plain, ill-proportioned and contemporaneous cousin of Ginny's Mayfair house, red brick with humbler, grubby white facings; no stone steps, no garden, no elegant neighbors, but a chipped door opening directly on to the street, peeling paint on the window ledges and a forlorn air. The utilitarian modern world had encroached until it sat huddled and miserable, out of synch with its surroundings, the flyover a mere twenty yards away, so that the upper windows looked directly out upon the concrete barriers and the endlessly passing cars. An unmistakably institutional flavor was given by the large silver buzzer and speaker beside the door, and the unapologetically ugly black camera, with its dangling wires, that hung from the lintel in a wire cage.

An emaciated young girl with a sore at the corner of her mouth stood smoking

outside the front door, wearing a dirty man's jumper that swamped her. She was

leaning up against the wall, staring blankly towards the commercial center barely five minutes' walk away, and when Potter pressed the buzzer for admission to the hostel, she gave him a look of deep calculation, apparently assessing his potentialities.

A small, fusty, grimy-floored lobby with shabby wooden paneling lay just inside the door. Two locked glass-paneled doors stood to left and right, affording him glimpses of a bare hall and a depressed-looking side room with a table full of leaflets, an old dartboard and a wall liberally peppered with holes. Straight ahead was a kiosk-like front desk, protected by another metal grille.

A gum-chewing woman behind the desk was reading a newspaper. She seemed suspicious and ill-disposed when Potter asked whether he could speak to a girl whose name was something like Rachel, and who had been a friend of Ginny Prewitt's.

"You a journalist?"

"No, I'm not; I'm a friend of a friend."

"Should know her name, then, shouldn't you?" "Rachel? Raquelle? Something like that."

A balding man strode into the kiosk behind the suspicious woman.

"I'm a private detective," said Potter, raising his voice, and the bald man looked around, interested. "Here's my card. I've been hired by Ginny Prewitt's brother, and I need to talk to—"

"Oh, you looking for Rochelle?" asked the bald man, approaching the grille. "She's not here, pal. She left."

His colleague, evincing some irritation at his willingness to talk to Potter, ceded her place at the counter and vanished from sight.

"When was this?"

"It'd be weeks now. Coupla months, even." "Any idea where she went?"

"No idea, mate. Probably sleeping rough again. She's come and gone a good few times. She's a difficult character. Mental health problems. Carrianne might know something though, hang on. Carrianne! Hey! Carrianne!"

The bloodless young girl with the scabbed lip came in out of the sunshine, her eyes narrowed.

"Wha'?"

"Rochelle, have you seen her?"

"Why would I wanna see that fuckin' bitch?" "So you haven't seen her?" asked the bald man. "No. Gorra fag?"

Potter gave her one; she put it behind her ear.

"She's still round 'ere somewhere. Janine said she seen 'er," said Carrianne. "Rochelle reckoned she'd gorra flat or some't. Lying fuckin' bitch. An' Ginny Prewitt left her ev'rything. _Not._Whadd'ya want Rochelle for?" she asked Potter, and it was clear that she was wondering whether there was money in it, and whether she might do instead.

"Just to ask some questions." "Warrabout?"

"Ginny Prewitt."

"Oh," said Carrianne, and her card-counting eyes flickered. "They weren't such big fuckin' mates. You don't wanna believe everything Rochelle says, the lying bitch."

"What did she lie about?" asked Potter.

"Fuckin' everything. I reckon she stole half the stuff she pretended Prewitt bought 'er."

"Come on, Carrianne," said the bald man gently. "They _w__e__r__e_friends," he told Potter. "Prewitt used to come and pick her up in her car. It caused," he said, with a glance at Carrianne, "a bit of tension."

"Not from me it fuckin' didn't," snapped Carrianne. "I thought Prewitt was a fuckin' jumped-up bitch. She weren't even that good-lookin'."

"Rochelle told me she's got an aunt in Kilburn," said the bald man. "She dun gerron with 'er, though," said the girl.

"Have you got a name or an address for the aunt?" asked Potter, but both

shook their heads. "What's Rochelle's surname?"

"I don't know; do you, Carrianne? We often know people just by their

Christian names," he told Potter.

There was little more to be gleaned from them. Rochelle had last stayed at the hostel more than two months previously. The bald man knew that she had attended an outpatients' clinic at St. Thomas's for a while, though he had no idea whether she still went.

"She's had psychotic episodes. She's on a lot of medication."

"She didn't give a shit when Ginny died," said Carrianne, suddenly. "She didn't give a flying fuck."

Both men looked at her. She shrugged, as one who has simply expressed an unpalatable truth.

"Listen, if Rochelle turns up again, will you give her my details and ask her to

call me?"

Potter gave both of them cards, which they examined with interest. While their attention was thus engaged, he deftly twitched the gum-chewing woman's _N__e__w__s of__the__W__orld_out of the small opening at the bottom of the grille and stowed it under his arm. He then bade them both a cheerful goodbye, and left.

It was a warm spring afternoon. Potter strode on down towards Hammersmith Bridge, its pale sage-green paint and ornate gilding picturesque in the sun. A single swan bobbed along the Thames beside the far bank. The offices and shops seemed a hundred miles away. Turning right, he headed along the walkway beside the river wall and a line of low, riverside terraced buildings, some balconied or draped in wisteria.

Potter bought himself a pint in the Blue Anchor, and sat outside on a wooden bench with his face to the water and his back to the royal-blue and white frontage. Lighting a cigarette, he turned to page four of the paper, where a color photograph of Michael Corner (head bowed, large bunch of white flowers in his hand, black coat flapping behind him) was surmounted by the headline: CORNER'S DEATHBED VISIT TO GINNY MOTHER.

The story was anodyne, really nothing more than an extended caption to the picture. The eyeliner and the flapping greatcoat, the slightly haunted, spaced-out expression, recalled Corner's appearance as he had headed towards his late girlfriend's funeral. He was described, in the few lines of type below, as "troubled actor-musician Michael Corner."

Potter's mobile vibrated in his pocket and he pulled it out. He had received a text message from an unfamiliar number.

News of the World page four Michael Corner. Hermione.

He grinned at the small screen before slipping the phone back in his pocket. The sun was warm on his head and shoulders. Seagulls cawed, wheeling overhead, and Potter, happily aware that he was due nowhere, and expected by no one, settled to read the paper from cover to cover on the sunny bench.

HERMIONE STOOD SWAYING WITH THE REST of the tightly packed commuters on a northbound Bakerloo Tube train, everyone wearing the tense and doleful expressions appropriate to a Monday morning. She felt the phone in her coat pocket buzz, and extricated it with difficulty, her elbow pressing unpleasantly into some unspecified flabby portion of a suited, bad-breathed man beside her. When she saw that the message was from Potter, she felt momentarily excited, nearly as excited as she had been to see Corner in the paper yesterday. Then she scrolled down, and read:

Out. Key behind cistern of toilet. Potter.

She did not force the phone back into her pocket, but continued to clutch it as the train rattled on through dark tunnels, and she tried not to breathe in the flabby man's halitosis. She was disgruntled. The previous day, she and Justin had eaten lunch, in company with two university friends of Justin's, at his favorite gastropub, the Windmill on the Common. When Hermione had spotted the picture of Michael Corner in an open copy of the _N__e__ws__of__t__he__W__orld_at a nearby table, she had made a breathless excuse, right in the middle of one of Justin's stories, and hurried outside to text Potter.

Justin had said, later, that she had shown bad manners, and even worse not to explain what she was up to, in favor of maintaining that ludicrous air of mystery.

Hermione gripped the hand strap tightly, and as the train slowed, and her heavy neighbor leaned into her, she felt both a little foolish, and resentful towards the two men, most particularly the detective, who was evidently uninterested in the unusual movements of Ginny Prewitt's ex-boyfriend.

By the time she had marched through the usual chaos and debris to Denmark Street, extracted the key from behind the cistern as instructed, and been snubbed yet again by a superior-sounding girl in Neville Longbottom's office, Hermione was in a thoroughly bad temper.

Though he did not know it, Potter was, at that very moment, passing the scene of the most romantic moments of Hermione's life. The steps below the statue of Eros were swarming with Italian teenagers this morning, as Potter went by on the St. James's side, heading for Glasshouse Street.

The entrance to Barrack, the nightclub which had so pleased Dean Thomas that he had remained there for hours, fresh off the plane from Los Angeles, was only a short walk from Piccadilly Circus. The facade looked as if it was made out of industrial concrete, and the name was picked out in shining black letters, vertically placed. The club extended up over four floors. As Potter had expected,

its doorway was surmounted by CCTV cameras, whose range, he thought, would cover most of the street. He walked around the building, noting the fire exits, and making for himself a rough sketch of the area.

After a second long internet session the previous evening, Potter felt that he had a thorough grasp of the subject of Dean Thomas's publicly declared interest in Ginny Prewitt. The rapper had mentioned the model in the lyrics of three tracks, on two separate albums; he had also spoken about her in interviews as his ideal woman and soul mate. It was difficult to gauge how seriously Thomas intended to be taken when he made these comments; allowance had to be made, in all the print interviews Potter had read, firstly for the rapper's sense of humor, which was both dry and sly, and secondly for the awe tinged with fear every interviewer seemed to feel when confronted with him.

An ex-gang member who had been imprisoned for gun and drug offenses in his native Los Angeles, Thomas was now a multimillionaire, with a number of lucrative businesses aside from his recording career. There was no doubt that the press had become "excited," to use Hermione's word, when news had leaked out that Thomas's record company had rented him the apartment below Ginny's. There had been much rabid speculation as to what might happen when Dean Thomas found himself a floor away from his supposed dream woman, and how this incendiary new element might affect the volatile relationship between Prewitt and Corner. These non-stories had all been peppered with undoubtedly spurious comments from friends of both—"He's already called her and asked her to dinner," "She's preparing a small party for him in her flat when he hits London." Such speculation had almost eclipsed the flurry of outraged comment from sundry columnists that the twice-convicted Thomas, whose music (they said) glorified his criminal past, was entering the country at all.

When he had decided that the streets surrounding Barrack had no more to tell him, Potter continued on foot, making notes of yellow lines in the vicinity, of Friday-night parking restrictions and of those establishments nearby that also had their own security cameras. His notes complete, he felt that he had earned a cup of tea and a bacon roll on expenses, both of which he enjoyed in a small café, while reading an abandoned copy of the _Daily __M__ai__l__._

His mobile rang as he was starting his second cup of tea, halfway through a gleeful account of the Prime Minister's gaffe in calling an elderly female voter "bigoted" without realizing that his microphone was still turned on.

A week ago, Potter had allowed his unwanted temp's calls to go to voicemail.

Today, he picked up.

"Hi, Hermione, how're you?"

"Fine. I'm just calling to give you your messages."

"Fire away," said Potter, as he drew out a pen.

"Lavender Brown's just called—Ronald Weasley's secretary—to say she's booked a table at Cipriani at one o'clock tomorrow, so that he can introduce you to Hannah Longbottom."

"Great."

"I've tried Neville Longbottom's production company again. They're getting irritated. They say he's in LA. I've left another request for him to call you."

"Good."

"And Peter Gillespie's telephoned again." "Uh huh," said Potter.

"He says it's urgent, and could you please get back to him as soon as

possible."

Potter considered asking her to call Gillespie back and tell him to go and fuck himself.

"Yeah, will do. Listen, could you text me the address of the night-club Uzi?" "Right."

"And try and find a number for a bloke called Draco Malfoy? He's a designer."

"Fine," said Hermione.

"Ask him if he'd be prepared to talk to me. Leave a message saying who I am,

and who's hired me." "Fine."

It was borne in on Potter that Hermione's tone was frosty. After a second or two, he thought he might know why.

"By the way, thanks for that text you sent yesterday," he said. "Sorry I didn't get back to you; it would have looked strange if I'd started texting, where I was. But if you could call Nigel Clements, Corner's agent, and ask for an appointment, that would be great too."

Her animosity fell away at once, as he had meant it to; her voice was many degrees warmer when she spoke again; verging, in fact, on excited.

"But Corner can't have had anything to do with it, can he? He had a cast-iron

alibi!"

"Yeah, well, we'll see about that," said Potter, deliberately ominous. "And listen, Hermione, if another death threat comes in—they usually arrive on Mondays…"

"Yes?" she said eagerly. "File it," said Potter.

He could not be sure—it seemed unlikely; she struck him as so prim—but he

thought he heard her mutter, "Sod you, then," as she hung up.

Potter spent the rest of the day engaged in tedious but necessary spadework. When Hermione had texted him the address, he visited his second nightclub of the day, this time in South Kensington. The contrast with Barrack was extreme; Uzi's discreet entrance might have been to a smart private house. There were security cameras over its doors, too. Potter then took a bus to Charles Street, where he was fairly sure Draco Malfoy lived, and walked what he guessed to be the most direct route between the designer's address and the house where Prewitt had died.

His leg was aching badly again by late afternoon, and he stopped for a rest and more sandwiches before setting out for the Feathers, near Scotland Yard, and his appointment with Gilderoy Lockhart.

It was another Victorian pub, this time with enormous windows reaching almost from floor to ceiling, looking out on to a great gray 1920s building decorated with statues by Jacob Epstein. The nearest of these sat over the doors, and stared down through the pub windows; a fierce seated deity was being embraced by his infant son, whose body was weirdly twisted back on itself, to show his genitalia. Time had eroded all shock value.

Inside the Feathers, machines were clinking and jingling and flashing primary- colored lights; the wall-mounted plasma TVs, surrounded with padded leather, were showing West Bromwich Albion versus Chelsea with the sound off, while Amy Winehouse throbbed and moaned from hidden speakers. The names of ales were painted on the cream wall above the long bar, which faced a wide dark- wood staircase with curving steps and shining brass handrails, leading up to the first floor.

Potter had to wait to be served, giving him time to look around. The place was full of men, most of whom had military-short hair; but a trio of girls with tangerine tans stood around a high table, throwing back their over-straightened

peroxide hair, in their tiny, tight spangled dresses, shifting their weight unnecessarily on their teetering heels. They were pretending not to know that the only solitary drinker, a handsome, boyish man in a leather jacket, who was sitting on a high bar seat beside the nearby window, was examining them, point by point, with a practiced eye. Potter bought himself a pint of Doom Bar and approached their appraiser.

"Harry Potter," he said, reaching Lockhart's table. Lockhart had the kind of hair Potter envied in other men; nobody would ever have called Lockhart "pubehead."

"Yeah, I thought it might be you," said the policeman, shaking hands. "Finnigan said you were a big bloke."

Potter pulled up a bar stool, and Lockhart said, without preamble:

"What've you got for me, then?"

"There was a fatal stabbing just off Ealing Broadway last month. Guy called

Liam Yates? Police informant, wasn't he?"

"Yeah, he got a knife in the neck. But we know who did it," said Lockhart, with a patronizing laugh. "Half the crooks in London know. If that's your information—"

"Don't know where he is, though, do you?"

With a quick glance at the determinedly unconscious girls, Lockhart slid a notebook out of his pocket.

"Go on."

"There's a girl who works in Betbusters on the Hackney Road called Shona Holland. She lives in a rented flat two streets away from the bookie's. She's got an unwelcome house guest at the moment called Brett Fearney, who used to beat up her sister. Apparently he's not the sort of bloke you refuse a favor."

"Got the full address?" asked Lockhart, who was scribbling hard.

"I've just given you the name of the tenant and half the postcode. How about

trying a bit of detective work?"

"And where did you say you got this?" asked Lockhart, still jotting rapidly with the notebook balanced under the table on his knee.

"I didn't," replied Potter equably, sipping his beer. "Got some interesting friends, haven't you?" "Very. Now, in a spirit of fair exchange…"

Lockhart, replacing his notebook in his pocket, laughed. "What you've just given me might be a crock of shit."

"It isn't. Play fair, Lockhart."

The policeman eyed Potter for a moment, apparently torn between amusement and suspicion.

"What are you after, then?"

"I told you on the phone: bit of inside information on Ginny Prewitt."

"Don't you read the papers?"

"Inside information, I said. My client thinks there was foul play." Lockhart's expression hardened.

"Hooked up with a tabloid, have we?" "No," said Potter. "Her brother."

"Ronald Weasley?"

Lockhart took a long pull on his pint, his eyes on the upper thighs of the nearest girl, his wedding ring reflecting red lights from the pinball machine.

"Is he still fixated on the CCTV footage?" "He mentioned it," admitted Potter.

"We tried to trace them," said Lockhart, "those two black guys. We put out an appeal. Neither of them turned up. No big surprise—a car alarm went off just about the time they would have been passing it—or trying to get into it. Maserati. Very tasty."

"Reckon they were nicking cars, do you?"

"I don't say they went there specifically to nick cars; they might have spotted an opportunity, seeing it parked there—what kind of tosser leaves a Maserati parked on the street? But it was nearly two in the morning, the temperature was below zero, and I can't think of many innocent reasons why two men would choose to meet at that time, in a Mayfair street where neither of them, as far as we could find out, lived."

"No idea where they came from, or where they went afterwards?"

"We're pretty sure the one Weasley's obsessed with, the one who was walking towards her flat just before she fell, got off the number thirty-eight bus in Wilton Street at a quarter past eleven. There's no saying what he did before he passed the

camera at the end of Bellamy Road an hour and a half later. He tanked back past it about ten minutes after Prewitt jumped, sprinted up Bellamy Road and most probably turned right down Weldon Street. There's some footage of a Draco more or less meeting his description—tall, black, hoodie, scarf round the face—caught on Theobalds Road about twenty minutes later."

"He made good time if he got to Theobalds Road in twenty minutes," commented Potter. "That's out towards Clerkenwell, isn't it? Must be two, two and a half miles. And the pavements were frozen."

"Yeah, well, it might not've been him. The footage was shit. Weasley thought it was very suspicious that he had his face covered, but it was minus ten that night, and I was wearing a balaclava to work myself. Anyway, whether he was in Theobalds Road or not, nobody ever came forward to say they'd recognized him."

"And the other one?"

"Sprinted off down Halliwell Street, about two hundred yards down; no idea

where he went after that."

"Or when he entered the area?"

"Could've come from anywhere. We haven't got any other footage of him." "Aren't there supposed to be ten thousand CCTV cameras in London?"

"They aren't everywhere yet. Cameras aren't the answer to our problems, unless they're maintained and monitored. The one in Garriman Street was out, and there aren't any in Meadowfield Road or Hartley Street. You're like everyone else, Potter; you want your civil liberties when you've told the missus you're at the office and you're at a lap-dancing club, but you want twenty-four- hour surveillance on your house when someone's trying to force your bathroom window open. Can't have it both ways."

"I'm not after it either way," said Potter. "I'm just asking what you know

about Runner Two."

"Muffled up to the eyeballs, like his mate; all you could see were his hands. If I'd been him, and had a guilty conscience about the Maserati, I'd have holed up in a bar and exited with a bunch of other people; there's a place called Bojo's off Halliwell Street he could've gone and mingled with the punters. We checked," Lockhart said, forestalling Potter's question. "Nobody recognized him from the footage."

They drank for a moment in silence.

"Even if we'd found them," said Lockhart, setting down his glass, "the most we could've got from them is an eyewitness account of her jumping. There wasn't

any unexplained DNA in her flat. Nobody had been in that place who shouldn't have been in there."

"It isn't just the CCTV footage that's giving Weasley ideas," said Potter. "He's been seeing a bit of Hannah Longbottom."

"Don't talk to me about Hannah fucking Longbottom," said Lockhart irritably.

"I'm going to have to mention her, because my client reckons she's telling the truth."

"Still at it, is she? Still hasn't given it up? I'll tell you about Mrs. Longbottom, shall I?"

"Go on," said Potter, one hand wrapped around the beer at his chest.

"Moody and I got to the scene about twenty, twenty-five minutes after Prewitt hit the road. Uniformed police were already there. Hannah Longbottom was still going strong with the hysterics when we saw her, gibbering and shaking and screaming that there was a murderer in the building.

"Her story was that she got up out of bed around two and went for a pee in the bathroom; she heard shouting from two flats above and saw Prewitt's body fall past the window.

"Now, the windows in those flats are triple-glazed or something. They're designed to keep the heat and the air conditioning in, and the noise of the hoi polloi out. By the time we were interviewing her, the street below was full of panda cars and neighbors, but you'd never have known it from up there except for the flashing blue lights. We could've been inside a fucking pyramid for all the noise that got inside that place.

"So I said to her, 'Are you sure you heard shouting, Mrs. Longbottom? Because this flat seems to be pretty much soundproofed.'

"She wouldn't back down. Swore she'd heard every word. According to her, Prewitt screamed something like 'You're too late,' and a man's voice said,

'You're a fucking liar.' Auditory hallucinations, they call them," said Lockhart. "You start hearing things when you snort so much coke your brains start dribbling out of your nose."

He took another long pull on his pint.

"Anyway, we proved beyond doubt she couldn't have heard it. The Longbottoms moved into a friend's house the next day to get away from the press, so we put a few blokes in their flat, and a guy up on Prewitt's balcony, shouting his head off. The lot on the first floor couldn't hear a word he was saying, and they were stone-cold sober, and making an effort.

"But while we were proving she was talking shit, Mrs. Longbottom was phoning half of London to tell them she was the sole witness to the murder of Ginny Prewitt. The press were already on to it, because some of the neighbors had heard her screaming about an intruder. Papers had tried and convicted Michael Corner before we even got back to Mrs. Longbottom.

"We put it to her that we'd now proven she couldn't have heard what she said she'd heard. Well, she wasn't ready to admit it had all been in her own head. She'd got a lot riding on it now, with the press swarming outside her front door like she was Ginny Prewitt reborn. So she came back with 'Oh, didn't I say? I opened them. Yeah, I opened the windows for a breath of fresh air.' "

Lockhart gave a scathing laugh.

"Sub-zero outside, and snowing."

"And she was in her underwear, right?"

"Looking like a rake with two plastic tangerines tied to it," said Lockhart, and the simile came out so easily that Potter was sure he was far from the first to have heard it. "We went ahead and double-checked the new story; we dusted for prints, and right enough, she hadn't opened the windows. No prints on the latches or anywhere else; the cleaner had done them the morning before Prewitt died, and hadn't been in since. As the windows were locked and bolted when we arrived, there's only one conclusion to be drawn, isn't there? Mrs. Hannah Longbottom is a fucking liar."

Lockhart drained his glass.

"Have another one," said Potter, and he headed for the bar without waiting for

an answer.

He noticed Lockhart's curious gaze roaming over his lower legs as he returned to the table. Under different circumstances, he might have banged the prosthesis hard against the table leg, and said "It's this one." Instead, he set down two fresh pints and some pork scratchings, which to his irritation were served in a small white ramekin, and continued where they had left off.

"Hannah Longbottom definitely witnessed Prewitt falling past the window, though, didn't she? Because Wilson reckons he heard the body fall right before Mrs. Longbottom started screaming."

"Maybe she saw it, but she wasn't having a pee. She was doing a couple of

lines of charlie in the bathroom. We found it there, cut and ready for her." "Left some, had she?"

"Yeah. Presumably the body falling past the window put her off."

"The window's visible from the bathroom?" "Yeah. Well, just."

"You got there pretty quickly, didn't you?"

"Uniformed lot were there in about eight minutes, and Moody and I were there in about twenty." Lockhart lifted his glass, as though to toast the force's efficiency.

"I've spoken to Wilson, the security guard," said Potter.

"Yeah? He didn't do bad," said Lockhart, with a trace of condescension. "It wasn't his fault he had the runs. But he didn't touch anything, and he did a proper search right after she'd jumped. Yeah, he did all right."

"He and his colleagues were a bit lazy on the door codes."

"People always are. Too many pin numbers and passwords to remember. Know the feeling."

"Weasley's interested in the possibilities of the quarter of an hour when Wilson was in the bog."

"We were, too, for about five minutes, before we'd satisfied ourselves that

Mrs. Longbottom was a publicity-mad cokehead." "Wilson mentioned that the pool was unlocked."

"Can he explain how a murderer got into the pool area, or back to it, without walking right past him? A fucking _pool,"_said Lockhart, "nearly as big as the one I've got at my gym, and all for the use of three fucking people. A _g__y__m_on the ground floor behind the security desk. Underground fucking parking. Flats done up with marble and shit like…like a fucking five-star hotel."

The policeman sat shaking his head very slowly over the unequal distribution of wealth.

"Different world," he said.

"I'm interested in the middle flat," said Potter.

"Dean Thomas's?" said Lockhart, and Potter was surprised to see a grin of genuine warmth spread across the policeman's face.

"What about it?"

"Did you go in there?"

"I had a look, but Bryant had already searched it. Empty. Windows bolted, alarm set and working properly."

"Is Bryant the one who knocked into the table and smashed a big floral

arrangement?"

Lockhart snorted.

"Heard about that, did you? Mr. Longbottom wasn't too chuffed about it. Oh yeah. Two hundred white roses in a crystal vase the size of a dustbin. Apparently he'd read that Thomas asks for white roses in his rider. His _rider,"_Lockhart said, as though Potter's silence implied an ignorance of what the term meant. "Stuff they ask for in their dressing rooms. I'd've thought _y__o__u__'d _know about this stuff."

Potter ignored the insinuation. He had hoped for better from Finnigan.

"Ever find out why Longbottom wanted Thomas to have roses?"

"Just schmoozing, isn't it? Probably wanted to put Thomas in a film. He was fucked off to the back teeth when he heard Bryant had ruined them. Yelling the place down when he found out."

"Anyone find it strange that he was upset about a bunch of flowers, when his

neighbor's lying in the street with her head smashed in?"

"He's one obnoxious fucker, Longbottom," said Lockhart, with feeling. "Used to people jumping to attention when he speaks. He tried treating all of us like staff, till he realized that wasn't clever.

"But the shouting wasn't really about the flowers. He was trying to drown out his wife, give her a chance to pull herself together. He kept forcing his way in between her and anyone who wanted to question her. Big guy as well, old Neville."

"What was he worried about?"

"That the longer she bawled and shook like a frozen whippet, the more bloody obvious it became that she'd been doing coke. He must've known it was lying around somewhere in the flat. He can't have been delighted to have the Met come bursting in. So he tried to distract everyone with a tantrum about his five- hundred-quid floral arrangement.

"I read somewhere that he's divorcing her. I'm not surprised. He's used to the press tiptoeing around him, because he's such a litigious bastard; he can't have enjoyed all the attention he got after Hannah shot her mouth off. The press made hay while they could. Rehashed old stories about him throwing plates at underlings. Punches in meetings. They say he paid his last wife a massive lump sum to stop her talking about his sex life in court. He's pretty well known as a prize shit."

"You didn't fancy him as a suspect?"

"Oh, we fancied him a lot; he was on the spot and he's got a rep for violence. It never looked likely, though. If his wife knew that he'd done it, or that he'd been out of the flat at the moment Prewitt fell, I'm betting she'd have told us so:

she was out of control when we got there. But she said he'd been in bed, and the

bedclothes were disarranged and looked slept in.

"Plus, if he'd managed to sneak out of the flat without her realizing it, and gone up to Prewitt's place, we're left with the problem of how he got past Wilson. He can't have taken the lift, so he'd have passed Wilson in the stairwell, coming down."

"So the timings rule him out?"

Lockhart hesitated.

"Well, it's just possible. _J__ust,_assuming Longbottom can move a damn sight faster than most men of his age and weight, and that he started running the moment he pushed her over. But there's still the fact that we didn't find his DNA anywhere in the flat, the question of how he got out of the flat without his wife knowing he'd gone, and the small matter of why Prewitt would have let him in. All her friends agreed she didn't like him. Anyway," Lockhart finished the dregs of his pint, "Longbottom's the kind of man who'd hire a killer if he wanted someone taken care of. He wouldn't sully his own hands."

"Another one?"

Lockhart checked his watch.

"My shout," he said, and he ambled up to the bar. The three young women standing around the high table fell silent, watching him greedily. Lockhart threw them a smirk as he walked back past with his drinks, and they glanced over at him as he resumed the bar stool beside Potter.

"How d'you think Wilson shapes up as a possible killer?" Potter asked the

policeman.

"Badly," said Lockhart. "He couldn't have got up and down quickly enough to meet Hannah Longbottom on the ground floor. Mind you, his CV's a crock of shit. He was employed on the basis of being ex-police, and he was never in the force."

"Interesting. Where was he?"

"He's been knocking around the security world for years. He admitted he'd lied to get his first job, about ten years ago, and he'd just kept it on his CV."

"He seems to have liked Prewitt."

"Yeah. He's older than he looks," said Lockhart, inconsequentially. "He's a grandfather. They don't show age like us, do they, Afro-Caribbeans? I wouldn't've put him as any older than you." Potter wondered idly how old Lockhart thought he was.

"You got forensics to check out her flat?"

"Oh yeah," said Lockhart, "but that was purely because the higher-ups wanted to put the thing beyond reasonable doubt. We knew within the first twenty-four hours it had to be suicide. We went the extra mile, though, with the whole fucking world watching."

He spoke with poorly disguised pride.

"The cleaner had been through the whole place that morning—sexy Polish girl, crap English, but bloody thorough with a duster—so the day's prints stood out good and clear. Nothing unusual."

"Wilson's prints were in there, presumably, because he searched the place after she fell?"

"Yeah, but nowhere suspicious."

"So as far as you're concerned, there were only three people in the whole building when she fell. Dean Thomas should have been there, but…"

"…he went straight from the airport to a nightclub, yeah," said Lockhart. Again, a broad and apparently involuntary grin illuminated his face. "I interviewed Dean at Claridges the day after she died. Massive bloke. Like you," he said, with a glance at Potter's bulky torso, "only fit." Potter took the hit without demur. "Proper ex-gangster. He's been in and out of the nick in LA. He nearly didn't get a visa to get into the UK.

"He had an entourage with him," said Lockhart. "All hanging around the room, rings on every finger, tattoos on their necks. He was the biggest, though. One scary fucker Dean'd be, if you met him down an alleyway. Politer than Longbottom by ten fucking miles. Asked me how the hell I could do my job without a gun."

The policeman was beaming. Potter could not help drawing the conclusion that

Gilderoy Lockhart, CID, was, in this case, as starstruck as Colin Creevy.

"Wasn't a long interview, seeing as he'd only just got off a plane and never set foot inside Kentigern Gardens. Routine. I got him to sign his latest CD for me at the end," Lockhart added, as though he could not help himself. "That brought the house down, he loved it. The missus wanted to put it on eBay, but I'm keeping…"

Lockhart stopped talking with an air of having given away a little more than he had intended. Amused, Potter helped himself to a handful of pork scratchings.

"What about Michael Corner?"

"Him," said Lockhart. The stardust that had sparkled over the policeman's account of Dean Thomas was gone; the policeman was scowling. "Little junkie

shit. He pissed us around from start to finish. He went straight into rehab the day

after she died."

"I saw. Where?"

"Priory, where else? Fucking rest cure." "So when did you interview him?"

"Next day, but we had to find him first; his people were being as obstructive as possible. Same story as Longbottom, wasn't it? They didn't want us to know what he'd really been doing. My missus," said Lockhart, scowling even harder, "thinks he's sexy. You married?"

"No," said Potter.

"Finnigan told me you left the army to get married to some woman who looks like a supermodel."

"What was Corner's story, once you got to him?"

"They'd had a big bust-up in the club, Uzi. Plenty of witnesses to that. She left, and his story was that he followed her, about five minutes later, wearing this fucking wolf mask. It covers the whole head. Lifelike, hairy thing. He told us he'd got it from a fashion shoot."

Lockhart's expression was eloquent of contempt.

"He liked putting this thing on to get in and out of places, to piss off the paparazzi. So, after Prewitt left Uzi, he got in his car—he had a driver outside, waiting for him—and went to Kentigern Gardens. Driver confirmed all that. Yeah, all right," Lockhart corrected himself impatiently, "he confirmed that he drove a man in a wolf's head, who he assumed was Corner as he was of Corner's height and build, and wearing what looked like Corner's clothes, and speaking in Corner's voice, to Kentigern Gardens."

"But he didn't take the wolf head off on the journey?"

"It's only about fifteen minutes to her flat from Uzi. No, he didn't take it off. He's a childish little prick.

"So then, by Corner's own account, he saw the paps outside her flat and decided not to go in after all. He told the driver to take him off to Soho, where he let him out. Corner walked round the corner to his dealer's flat in d'Arblay Street, where he shot up."

"Still wearing the wolf's head?"

"No, he took it off there," said Lockhart. "The dealer, name of Whycliff, is an ex-public schoolboy with a habit way worse than Corner's. He gave a full

statement agreeing that Corner had come round at about half past two. It was only the pair of them there, and yeah, I'd take long odds that Whycliff would lie for Corner, but a woman on the ground floor heard the doorbell ring and says she saw Corner on the stair.

"Anyway, Corner left Whycliff's around four, with the bloody wolf's head back on, and rambled off towards the place where he thought his car and driver were waiting; except that the driver was gone. The driver claimed a misunderstanding. He thought Corner was an arsehole; he made that clear when we took his statement. Corner wasn't paying him; the car was on Prewitt's account.

"So then Corner, who's got no money on him, walks all the way to Ciara Greengrass's place in Notting Hill. We found a few people who'd seen a man wearing a wolf's head strolling along relevant streets, and there's footage of him cadging a free box of matches from a woman in an all-night garage."

"Can you make out his face?"

"No, because he only shoved the wolf head up to speak to her, and all you can see is its snout. She said it was Corner, though.

"He got to Greengrass's around half four. She let him sleep on the sofa, and about an hour later she got the news about Prewitt being dead, and woke him up to tell him. Cue histrionics and rehab."

"You checked for a suicide note?" asked Potter.

"Yeah. There was nothing in the flat, nothing on her laptop, but that wasn't a surprise. She did it on the spur of the moment, didn't she? She was bipolar, she'd just argued with that little tosser and it pushed her over—well, you know what I mean."

Lockhart checked his watch, and drained the last of his pint.

"I'm gonna have to go. The wife'll be pissed off, I told her I'd only be half an hour."

The over-tanned girls had left without either man noticing. Out on the pavement, both lit up cigarettes.

"I hate this fucking smoking ban," said Lockhart, zipping his leather jacket up to the neck.

"Have we got a deal, then?" asked Potter.

Cigarette between his lips, Lockhart pulled on a pair of gloves.

"I dunno about that."

"C'mon, Lockhart," said Potter, handing the policeman a card, which Lockhart accepted as though it were a joke item. "I've given you Brett Fearney."

Lockhart laughed outright.

"Not yet you haven't."

He slipped Potter's card into a pocket, inhaled, blew smoke skywards, then

shot the larger man a look compounded of curiosity and appraisal.

"Yeah, all right. If we get Fearney, you can have the file."


	14. Chapter 14

"MICHAEL CORNER'S AGENT SAYS HIS client isn't taking any further calls or giving any interviews about Ginny Prewitt," said Hermione next morning. "I did make it clear that you're not a journalist, but he was adamant. And the people in Draco Malfoy's office are ruder than Neville Longbottom's. You'd think I was trying to get an audience with the Pope."

"OK," said Potter. "I'll see whether I can get at him through Longbottom."

It was the first time that Hermione had seen Potter in a suit. He looked, she thought, like a rugby player en route to an international: large, conventionally smart in his dark jacket and subdued tie. He was on his knees, searching through one of the cardboard boxes he had brought from Astoria's flat. Hermione was averting her gaze from his boxed-up possessions. They were still avoiding any mention of the fact that Potter was living in his office.

"Aha," he said, finally locating, from amid a pile of his mail, a bright blue envelope: the invitation to his nephew's party. "Bollocks," he added, on opening it.

"What's the matter?"

"It doesn't say how old he is," said Potter. "My nephew."

Hermione was curious about Potter's relations with his family. As she had never been officially informed, however, that Potter had numerous half-brothers and - sisters, a famous father and a mildly infamous mother, she bit back all questions and continued to open the day's paltry mail.

Potter got up off the floor, replaced the cardboard box in a corner of the inner office and returned to Hermione.

"What's that?" he asked, seeing a sheet of photocopied newsprint on the desk.

"I kept it for you," she said diffidently. "You said you were glad you'd seen that story about Michael Corner…I thought you might be interested in this, if you haven't already seen it."

It was a neatly clipped article about film producer Neville Longbottom, taken from the previous day's _E__ve__ning S__t__andard._

"Excellent; I'll read that on the way to lunch with his wife."

"Soon to be ex," said Hermione. "It's all in that article. He's not very lucky in love, Mr. Longbottom."

"From what Lockhart told me, he's not a very lovable man," said Potter.

"How did you get that policeman to talk to you?" Hermione said, unable to hold back her curiosity on this point. She was desperate to learn more about the process and progress of the investigation.

"We've got a mutual friend," said Potter. "Bloke I knew in Afghanistan; Met officer in the TA."

"You were in Afghanistan?"

"Yeah." Potter was pulling on his overcoat, the folded article on Neville

Longbottom and the invitation to Jack's party between his teeth.

"What were you doing in Afghanistan?"

"Investigating a Killed In Action," said Potter. "Military police." "Oh," said Hermione.

Military police did not tally with Justin's impression of a charlatan, or a

waster.

"Why did you leave?" "Injured," said Potter.

He had described that injury to Wilson in the starkest of terms, but he was wary of being equally frank with Hermione. He could imagine her shocked expression, and he stood in no need of her sympathy.

"Don't forget to call Peter Gillespie," Hermione reminded him, as he headed out of the door.

Potter read the photocopied article as he rode the Tube to Bond Street. Neville Longbottom had inherited his first fortune from a father who had made a great deal of money in haulage; he had made his second by producing highly commercial films that serious critics treated with derision. The producer was currently going to court to refute claims, by two newspapers, that he had behaved with gross impropriety towards a young female employee, whose silence he had subsequently bought. The accusations, carefully hedged around with many "alleged"s and "reported"s, included aggressive sexual advances and a degree of physical bullying. They had been made "by a source close to the alleged victim," the girl herself having refused either to press charges or to speak to the press. The fact that Neville was currently divorcing his latest wife, Hannah, was mentioned in the concluding paragraph, which ended with a reminder that the unhappy couple had been in the building on the night that Ginny Prewitt took her own life. The reader was left with the odd impression that the Longbottoms' mutual unhappiness might have influenced Prewitt in her decision to jump.

Potter had never moved in the kinds of circles that dined at Cipriani. It was only as he walked up Jones Street, the sun warm on his back and imparting a ruddy glow to the red-brick building ahead, that he thought how odd it would be, yet not unlikely, if he ran into one of his half-siblings there. Restaurants like Cipriani were part of the regular lives of Potter's father's legitimate children. He had last heard from three of them while in Selly Oak Hospital, undergoing physiotherapy. Gabi and Danni had jointly sent flowers; Al had visited once, laughing too loudly and scared of looking at the lower end of the bed. Afterwards, Astoria had imitated Al braying and wincing. She was a good mimic. Nobody ever expected a girl that beautiful to be funny, yet she was.

The interior of the restaurant had an art deco feeling, the bar and chairs of mellow polished wood, with pale yellow tablecloths on the circular tables and white-jacketed, bow-tied waiters and waitresses. Potter spotted his client immediately among the clattering, jabbering diners, sitting at a table set for four and talking, to Potter's surprise, to two women instead of one, both with long, glossy brown hair. Longbottom's rabbity face was full of the desire to please, or perhaps placate.

The lawyer jumped up to greet Potter when he saw him, and introduced Hannah Longbottom, who held out a thin, cool hand, but did not smile, and her sister, Megan Jones, who did not hold out a hand at all. While the preliminaries of ordering drinks and handing around menus were navigated, Longbottom nervous and over- talkative throughout, the sisters subjected Potter to the kind of brazenly critical stares that only people of a certain class feel entitled to give.

They were both as pristine and polished as life-size dolls recently removed from their cellophane boxes; rich-girl thin, almost hipless in their tight jeans, with tanned faces that had a waxy sheen especially noticeable on their foreheads, their long, gleaming dark manes with center partings, the ends trimmed with spirit-level exactitude.

When Potter finally chose to look up from his menu, Hannah said, without preamble:

"Are you really" (she pronounced it "rarely") "James Potter's son?" "So the DNA test said," he replied.

She seemed uncertain whether he was being funny or rude. Her dark eyes were fractionally too close together, and the Botox and fillers could not smooth away the petulance in her expression.

"Listen, I've just been telling Ronald," she said curtly. "I'm not going public again, OK? I'm perfectly happy to tell you what I heard, because I'd love you to prove I was right, but you mustn't tell anyone I've talked to you."

The unbuttoned neck of her thin silk shirt revealed an expanse of butterscotch skin stretched over her bony sternum, giving an unattractively knobbly effect; yet two full, firm breasts jutted from her narrow ribcage, as though they had been borrowed for the day from a fuller-figured friend. "We could have met somewhere more discreet," commented Potter.

"No, it's fine, because nobody here will know who you are. You don't look anything like your father, do you? I met him at Elton's last summer. Neville knows him. D'you see much of James?"

"I've met him twice," said Potter. "Oh," said Hannah.

The monosyllable contained equal parts of surprise and disdain.

Astoria had had friends like this; sleek-haired, expensively educated and clothed, all of them appalled by her strange yen for the enormous, battered- looking Potter. He had come up against them for years, by phone and in person, with their clipped vowels and their stockbroker husbands, and the brittle toughness Astoria had never been able to fake.

"I don't think she should be talking to you at all," said Megan abruptly. Her tone and expression would have been appropriate had Potter been a waiter who had just thrown aside his apron and joined them, uninvited, at the table. "I think you're making a big mistake, Hannah."

Longbottom said: "Megan, Hannah simply—"

"It's up to me what I do," Hannah snapped at her sister, as though Longbottom had not spoken, as though his chair was empty. "I'm only going to say what I heard, that's all. It's all off the record; Ronald's agreed to that."

Evidently she too viewed Potter as domestic class. He was irked not only by their tone, but also by the fact that Longbottom was giving witnesses assurances without his say-so. How could Hannah's evidence, which could have come from nobody but her, be kept off the record?

For a few moments all four of them ran their eyes over the culinary options in silence. Megan was the first to put down her menu. She had already finished a glass of wine. She helped herself to another, and glanced restlessly around the restaurant, her eyes lingering for a second on a blonde minor royal, before passing on.

"This place used to be full of the most fabulous people, even at lunchtime. Theodore only ever wants to go to bloody Wiltons, with all the other stiffs in suits…"

"Is Theodore your husband, Mrs. Jones?" asked Potter.

He guessed that it would needle her if he crossed what she evidently saw as an invisible line between them; she did not think that sitting at a table with her gave him a right to her conversation. She scowled, and Longbottom rushed to fill the uncomfortable pause.

"Yes, Megan's married to Theodore Jones, one of our senior partners."

"So I'm getting the family discount on my divorce," said Hannah, with a slightly bitter smile.

"And her ex will go absolutely ballistic if she starts dragging the press back into their lives," Megan said, her dark eyes boring into Potter's. "They're trying to thrash out a settlement. It could seriously prejudice her alimony if that all kicks off again. So you'd better be discreet."

With a bland smile, Potter turned to Hannah:

"You had a connection with Ginny Prewitt, then, Mrs. Longbottom? Your brother- in-law works with Ronald?"

"It never came up," she said, looking bored.

The waiter returned to take their orders. When he had left, Potter took out his notebook and pen.

"What are you doing with those?" demanded Hannah, in a sudden panic. "I don't want anything written down! Ronald?" she appealed to Longbottom, who turned to Potter with a flustered and apologetic expression.

"D'you think you could just listen, Harry, and, ah, skip the note-taking?" "No problem," said Potter easily, removing his mobile phone from his pocket

and replacing the notebook and pen. "Mrs. Longbottom—"

"You can call me Hannah," she said, as though this concession made up for her objections to the notebook.

"Thanks very much," said Potter, with the merest trace of irony. "How well did you know Ginny?"

"Oh, hardly at all. She was only there for three months. It was just 'Hi' and

'Nice day.' She wasn't interested in us, we weren't nearly hip enough for her. It was a bore, to be honest, having her there. Paps outside the front door all the time. I had to put on makeup even to go to the gym."

"Isn't there a gym in the building?" asked Potter.

"I do Pilates with Lindsey Parr," said Hannah, irritably. "You sound like Neville; he was always complaining that I didn't use the facilities at the flat."

"And how well did Neville know Ginny?"

"Hardly at all, but that wasn't for lack of trying. He had some idea about luring her into acting; he kept trying to invite her downstairs. She never came, though. And he followed her to Dickie Carbury's house, the weekend before she died, while I was away with Megan."

"I didn't know that," said Longbottom, looking startled.

Potter noticed Megan's quick smirk at her sister. He had the impression that she had been looking for an exchange of complicit glances, but Hannah did not oblige.

"I didn't know until later," Hannah told Longbottom. "Yah, Neville cadged an invitation from Dickie; there was a whole group of them there: Ginny, Michael Corner, Daphne Greengrass, all that tabloidy, druggie, trendy gang. Neville must have stuck out like a sore thumb. I know he's not much older than Dickie, but he looks ancient," she added spitefully.

"What did your husband tell you about the weekend?"

"Nothing. I only found out he'd been there weeks later, because Dickie let it slip. I'm sure Neville went to try and make up to Ginny, though."

"Do you mean," asked Potter, "that he was interested in Ginny sexually, or…?" "Oh yah, I'm sure he was; he's always liked dark girls better than blondes.

What he really loves, though, is getting a bit of celebrity meat into his films. He

drives directors mad, trying to crowbar in celebrities, to get a bit of extra press. I'll bet he was hoping to get her signed up for a film, and I wouldn't be at all surprised," Hannah added, with unexpected shrewdness, "if he had something planned around her and Dean Thomas. Imagine the press, with the fuss there was already about the two of them. Neville's got a genius for that stuff. He loves publicity for his films as much as he hates it for himself."

"Does he know Dean Thomas?"

"Not unless they've met since we separated. He hadn't met Thomas before Ginny died. God, he was thrilled that Thomas was coming to stay in the building; he started talking about casting him the moment he heard."

"Casting him as what?"

"I don't know," she said irritably. "Anything. Thomas's got a huge following; Neville wasn't going to pass that chance up. He'd probably have had a part written specially for him if he'd been interested. Oh, he would have been all over him. Telling him all about his pretend black grandmother." Hannah's voice was contemptuous. "That's what he always does when he meets famous black people: tells them he's a quarter Malay. Yeah, _what__e__ve__r,_Neville."

"Isn't he a quarter Malay?" asked Potter.

She gave a snide little laugh.

"I don't know; I never met any of Neville's grandparents, did I? He's about a hundred years old. I know he'll say anything if he thinks there's money in it."

"Did anything ever come of these plans to get Ginny and Thomas into his films, as far as you're aware?"

"Well, I'm sure Ginny was flattered to be asked; most of these model girls are dying to prove they can do something other than stare into a camera, but she never signed up to anything, did she, Ronald?"

"Not as far as I know," said Longbottom. "Although…but that was something different," he mumbled, turning blotchily pink again. He hesitated, then, responding to Potter's interrogative gaze, he said:

"Mr. Longbottom visited my mother a couple of weeks ago, out of the blue. She's exceptionally poorly, and…well, I wouldn't want to…"

His glance at Hannah was uncomfortable.

"Say what you like, I don't care," she said, with what seemed like genuine

indifference.

Longbottom made the strange jutting and sucking movement that temporarily hid the hamsterish teeth.

"Well, he wanted to talk to my mother about a film of Ginny's life. He, ah, framed his visit as something considerate and sensitive. Asking for her family's blessing, official sanction, you know. Ginny dead barely three months…Mum was distressed beyond measure. Unfortunately, I was not there when he called," said Longbottom, and his tone implied that he was generally to be found standing guard over his mother. "I wish, in a way, I had been. I wish I'd heard him out. I mean, if he's got researchers working on Ginny's life story, much as I deplore the idea, he might know something, mightn't he?"

"What kind of thing?" asked Potter.

"I don't know. Something about her early life, perhaps? Before she came to us?"

The waiter arrived to place starters in front of them all. Potter waited until he had gone, and then asked Longbottom:

"Have you tried to speak to Mr. Longbottom yourself, and find out whether he knew anything about Ginny that the family didn't?"

"That's just what's so difficult," said Longbottom. "When Gideon—my uncle— heard what had happened, he contacted Mr. Longbottom to protest about him badgering my mother, and from what I've heard, there was a very heated argument. I don't think Mr. Longbottom would welcome further contact from the family. Of course, the situation's further complicated by the fact that Hannah is using our firm for the divorce. I mean, there's nothing in that—we're one of the top family law firms, and with Megan being married to Theodore, naturally she would come to us…But I'm sure it won't have made Mr. Longbottom feel any more kindly towards us."

Though he had kept his gaze on the lawyer all the time that Longbottom was talking, Potter's peripheral vision was excellent. Megan had thrown another tiny smirk in her sister's direction. He wondered what was amusing her. Doubtless her improved mood was not hindered by the fact that she was now on her fourth glass of wine.

Potter finished his starter and turned to Hannah, who was pushing her virtually untouched food around her plate.

"How long had you and your husband been at number eighteen before Ginny moved in?"

"About a year."

"Was there anyone in the middle flat when she arrived?"

"Yah," said Hannah. "There was an American couple there with their little boy for six months, but they went back to the States not long after she arrived. After that, the property company couldn't get anyone interested at all. The recession, you know? They cost an arm and a leg, those flats. So it was empty until the record company rented it for Dean Thomas."

Both she and Megan were distracted by the sight of a woman passing the table in what, to Potter, appeared to be a crocheted coat of lurid design.

"That's a Daumier-Cross coat," said Megan, her eyes slightly narrowed over her wineglass. "There's a waiting list of, like, six months…"

"It's Pansy Marks-Dillon," said Hannah. "Easy to be on the best-dressed list if your husband's got fifty mill. Neville's the cheapest rich man in the world; I had to hide new stuff from him, or pretend it was fake. He could be such a bore sometimes."

"You always look wonderful," said Longbottom, pink in the face.

"You're sweet," said Hannah Longbottom in a bored voice.

The waiter arrived to clear away their plates.

"What were you saying?" she asked Potter. "Oh, yah, the flats. Dean Thomas coming…except he didn't. Neville was furious he never got there, because he'd put roses in his flat. Neville is such a cheap bastard."

"How well do you know Tom Wilson?" Potter asked.

She blinked.

"Well—he's the security guard; I don't know him, do I? He seemed all right. Neville always said he was the best of the bunch."

"Really? Why was that?"

She shrugged.

"I don't know, you'd have to ask Neville. And good luck with that," she

added, with a little laugh. "Neville'll talk to you when hell freezes over."

"Hannah," said Longbottom, leaning in a little, "why don't you just tell Harry what you actually heard that night?"

Potter would have preferred Longbottom not to intervene.

"Well," said Hannah. "It was getting on for two in the morning, and I wanted a drink of water."

Her tone was flat and expressionless. Potter noticed that, even in this small beginning, she had altered the story she had told the police.

"So I went to the bathroom to get one, and as I was heading back across the sitting room, towards the bedroom, I heard shouting. She—Ginny—was saying,

'It's too late, I've already done it,' and then a man said, 'You're a lying fucking bitch,' and then—and then he threw her over. I actually saw her fall."

And Hannah made a tiny jerky movement with her hands that Potter understood to indicate flailing.

Longbottom set down his glass, looking nauseated. Their main courses arrived. Megan drank more wine. Neither Hannah nor Longbottom touched their food. Potter picked up his fork and began to eat, trying not to look as though he was enjoying his _puntar__e__l__l__e _with anchovies.

"I screamed," whispered Hannah. "I couldn't stop screaming. I ran out of the flat, past Neville, and downstairs. I just wanted to tell security that there was a man up there, so they could get him.

"Wilson came dashing out of the room behind the desk. I told him what had happened and he went straight out on to the street to see her, instead of running upstairs. Bloody fool. If only he'd gone upstairs first, he might have caught him!

Then Neville came down after me, and started trying to make me go back to our

flat, because I wasn't dressed.

"Then Wilson came back, and told us she was dead, and told Neville to call the police. Neville virtually dragged me back upstairs—I was completely hysterical—and he dialed 999 from our sitting room. And then the police came. And nobody believed a single word I said."

She sipped her wine again, set down the glass and said quietly:

"If Neville knew I was talking to you, he'd go ape."

"But you're quite sure, aren't you, Hannah," Longbottom interjected, "that you heard a man up there?"

"Yah, of course I am," said Hannah. "I've just said, haven't I? There was definitely someone there."

Longbottom's mobile rang.

"Excuse me," he muttered. "Lavender…yes?" he said, picking up.

Potter could hear the secretary's deep voice, without being able to make out

the words.

"Excuse me just a moment," Longbottom said, looking harried, and he left the table.

A look of malicious amusement appeared on both sisters' smooth, polished faces. They glanced at each other again; then, somewhat to his surprise, Megan asked Potter:

"Have you met Lavender?"

"Briefly."

"You know they're together?" "Yes."

"It's a bit pathetic, actually," said Hannah. "She's with Ronald, but she's actually obsessed with Gideon. Have you met Gideon?"

"No," said Potter.

"He's one of the senior partners. Ronald's uncle, you know?"

"Yes."

"Very attractive. He wouldn't go for Lavender in a million years. I suppose she's settled for Ronald as consolation prize."

The thought of Lavender's doomed infatuation seemed to afford the sisters great satisfaction.

"This is all common gossip at the office, is it?" asked Potter.

"Oh, yah," said Megan, with relish. "Theodore says she's absolutely embarrassing. Like a puppy dog around Gideon."

Her antipathy towards Potter seemed to have evaporated. He was not surprised; he had met the phenomenon many times. People liked to talk; there were very few exceptions; the question was how you made them do it. Some, and Megan was evidently one of them, were amenable to alcohol; others liked a spotlight; and then there were those who merely needed proximity to another conscious human being. A subsection of humanity would become loquacious only on one favorite subject: it might be their own innocence, or somebody else's guilt; it might be their collection of pre-war biscuit tins; or it might, as in the case of Megan Jones, be the hopeless passion of a plain secretary.

Megan was watching Longbottom through the window; he was standing on the pavement, talking hard into his mobile as he paced up and down. Her tongue properly loosened now, she said:

"I bet I know what that's about. Conway Oates's executors are making a fuss about how the firm handled his affairs. He was the American financier, you know? Theodore and Gideon are in a real bait about it, making Ronald fly around trying to smooth things over. Ronald always gets the shitty end of the stick."

Her tone was more scathing than sympathetic. Longbottom returned to the table, looking flustered.

"Sorry, sorry, Lavender just wanted to give me some messages," he said.

The waiter came to collect their plates. Potter was the only one who had cleared his. When the waiter was out of earshot, Potter said:

"Hannah, the police disregarded your evidence because they didn't think you could have heard what you claimed to have heard."

"Well they were wrong, weren't they?" she snapped, her good humor gone in a trice. "I did hear it."

"Through a closed window?"

"It was open," she said, meeting none of her companions' eyes. "It was stuffy, I opened one of the windows on the way to get water."

Potter was sure that pressing her on the point would only lead to her refusing to answer any other questions.

"They also allege that you'd taken cocaine."

Hannah made a little noise of impatience, a soft "cuh."

"Look," she said, "I had some earlier, during dinner, OK, and they found it in the bathroom when they looked around the flat. The fucking _bo__r__e__dom_of the Dunnes. Anyone would have done a couple of lines to get through Benjy Dunne's bloody anecdotes. But I didn't imagine that voice upstairs. A man was there, and he killed her. _He__ k__i__l__led h__e__r,"_repeated Hannah, glaring at Potter.

"And where do you think he went afterwards?"

"I don't know, do I? That's what Ronald's paying you to find out. He sneaked out somehow. Maybe he climbed out the back window. Maybe he hid in the lift. maybe he went out through the car park downstairs. I don't bloody know how he got out, I just know he was there."

"We believe you," interjected Longbottom anxiously. "We believe you, Hannah. Harry needs to ask these questions to—to get a clear picture of how it all happened."

"The police did everything they could to discredit me," said Hannah, disregarding Longbottom and addressing Potter. "They got there too late, and he'd already gone, so of course they covered it up. No one who hasn't been through what I went through with the press can understand what it was like. It was absolute bloody hell. I went into the clinic just to get away from it all. I can't believe it's legal, what the press are allowed to do in this country; and all for telling the truth, that's the bloody joke. I should've kept my mouth shut, shouldn't I? I would have, if I'd known what was coming."

She twisted her loose diamond ring around her finger.

"Neville was asleep in bed when Ginny fell, wasn't he?" Potter asked Hannah.

"Yah, that's right," she said.

Her hand slid up to her face and she smoothed nonexistent strands of hair off her forehead. The waiter returned with menus again, and Potter was forced to hold back his questions until they had ordered. He was the only one to ask for pudding; all the rest had coffee.

"When did Neville get out of bed?" he asked Hannah, when the waiter had left. "What do you mean?"

"You say he was in bed when Ginny fell; when did he get up?"

"When he heard me screaming," she said, as though this was obvious. "I woke

him up, didn't I?"

"He must have moved quickly." "Why?"

"You said: 'I ran out of the flat, past Neville, and downstairs.' So he was already in the room before you ran out to tell Tom what had happened?"

A missed beat.

"That's right," she said, smoothing her immaculate hair again, shielding her face.

"So he went from fast asleep in bed, to awake and in the sitting room, within seconds? Because you started screaming and running pretty much instantaneously, from what you said?"

Another infinitesimal pause.

"Yah," she said. "Well—I don't know. I think I screamed—I screamed while I was frozen on the spot—for a moment, maybe—I was just so shocked—and Neville came running out of the bedroom, and then I ran past him."

"Did you stop to tell him what you'd seen?" "I can't remember."

Longbottom looked as though he was about to stage one of his untimely interventions again. Potter held up a hand to forestall him; but Hannah plunged off on another tack, eager, he guessed, to leave the subject of her husband.

"I've thought and thought about how the killer got in, and I'm sure he must have followed her inside when she came in that morning, because of Tom Wilson leaving his desk and being in the bathroom. I thought Wilson ought to have been bloody sacked for it, actually. If you ask me, he was having a sneaky sleep in the back room. I don't know how the killer would have known the key code, but I'm sure that's when he must have got in."

"Do you think you'd be able to recognize the man's voice again? The one you heard shouting?"

"I doubt it," she said. "It was just a man's voice. It could have been anyone. There was nothing unusual about it. I mean, afterwards I thought, _W__as__it Corner__?_" she said, gazing at him intently, "because I'd heard Corner shouting upstairs, once before, from the top landing. Wilson had to throw him out; Corner was trying to kick in Ginny's door. I never understood what a girl with her looks was doing with someone like Corner," she added in parenthesis.

"Some women say he's sexy," agreed Megan, emptying the wine bottle into her glass, "but I can't see the appeal. He's just skanky and horrible."

"It's not even," said Hannah, twisting the loose diamond ring again, "as though he's got money."

"But you don't think it was his voice you heard that night?"

"Well, like I say, it could have been," she said impatiently, with a small shrug of her thin shoulders. "He's got an alibi, though, hasn't he? Loads of people said he was nowhere near Kentigern Gardens the night Ginny was killed. He spent part of it at Daphne Greengrass's, didn't he? Bitch," Hannah added, with a small, tight smile. "Sleeping with her best friend's boyfriend."

"Were they sleeping together?" asked Potter.

"Oh, what do _y__ou_think?" laughed Megan, as though the question was too naive for words. "I know Daphne Greengrass, she modeled in this charity fashion show I was involved in setting up. She's such an airhead and such a slut."

The coffees had arrived, along with Potter's sticky toffee pudding.

"I'm sorry, Ronald, but Ginny didn't have very good taste in friends," said Hannah, sipping her espresso. "There was Daphne, and then there was that Pansy Radford. Not that she was a friend, exactly, but I wouldn't trust her as far as I could throw her."

"Who's Pansy?" asked Potter disingenuously, for he remembered who she

was.

"Makeup artist. Charges a fortune, and such a bloody bitch," said Megan. "I used her once, before one of the Gorbachev Foundation balls, and afterwards she told ev—"

Megan stopped abruptly, lowered her glass and picked up her coffee instead. Potter, who despite its undoubted irrelevance to the matter in hand was quite interested to know what Pansy had told everyone, began to speak, but Hannah talked loudly over him.

"Oh, and there was that ghastly girl Ginny used to bring around to the flat, too, Ronald, remember?"

She appealed to Longbottom again, but he looked blank.

"You know, that ghastly—that rarely awful-colored girl she sometimes dragged back. A kind of hobo person. I mean…she literally smelled. When she'd been in the lift…you could smell it. And she took her into the pool, too. I didn't think blacks could swim."

Longbottom was blinking rapidly, pink in the face.

"God knows what Ginny was doing with her," said Hannah. "Oh, you must remember, Ronald. She was fat. Scruffy. Looked a bit subnormal."

"I don't…" mumbled Longbottom.

"Are you talking about Rochelle?" asked Potter.

"Oh, yah, I think that was her name. She was at the funeral, anyway," said

Hannah. "I noticed her. She was sitting right at the back.

"Now, you will remember, won't you," she turned the full force of her dark eyes upon Potter, "that this is all entirely off the record. I mean, I cannot afford for Neville to find out I'm talking to you. I'm not going to go through all that shit with the press again. Bill, please," she barked at the waiter.

When it arrived, she passed it without comment to Longbottom.

As the sisters were preparing to leave, shaking their glossy brown hair back over their shoulders and pulling on expensive jackets, the door of the restaurant opened and a tall, thin, besuited man of around sixty entered, looked around and headed straight for their table. Silver-haired and distinguished-looking, impeccably dressed, there was a certain chilliness about his pale blue eyes. His walk was brisk and purposeful.

"This is a surprise," he said smoothly, stopping in the space between the two women's chairs. None of the other three had seen the man coming, and all bar Potter displayed equal parts of shock and something more than displeasure at the sight of him. For a fraction of a second, Hannah and Megan froze, Megan in the act of pulling sunglasses out of her bag.

Hannah recovered first.

"Theodore," she said, offering her face for his kiss. "Yes, what a lovely surprise!"

"I thought you were going shopping, Megan dear?" he said, his eyes on his

wife as he gave Hannah a conventional peck on each cheek.

"We stopped for lunch, Theo," she replied, but her color was heightened, and

Potter sensed an ill-defined nastiness in the air.

The older man's pale eyes moved deliberately over Potter and came to rest on

Longbottom.

"I thought Gideon was handling your divorce, Hannah?" he asked.

"He is," said Hannah. "This isn't a business lunch, Theo. Purely social."

He gave a wintry smile.

"Let me escort you out, then, m'dears," he said.

With a cursory farewell to Longbottom, and no word whatsoever for Potter, the two sisters permitted themselves to be shepherded out of the restaurant by Megan's husband. When the door had swung shut behind the threesome, Potter asked Longbottom:

"What was that about?"

"That was Theodore," said Longbottom. He seemed agitated as he fumbled with his credit card and the bill. "Theodore Jones. Megan's husband. Senior partner at the firm. He won't like Hannah talking to you. I wonder how he knew where we were. Probably got it out of Lavender."

"Why won't he like her talking to me?"

"Hannah's his sister-in-law," said Longbottom, putting on his overcoat. "He won't want her to make a fool of herself—as he'll see it—all over again. I'll probably get a real bollocking for persuading her to meet you. I expect he's phoning my uncle right now, to complain about me."

Longbottom's hands, Potter noticed, were trembling.

The lawyer left in a taxi ordered by the maître d'. Potter headed away from Cipriani on foot, loosening his tie as he walked, and lost so deeply in thought that he was only jerked out of his reverie by a loud horn blast from a car he had not seen speeding towards him as he crossed Grosvenor Street.

With this salutary reminder that his safety would otherwise be in jeopardy, Potter headed for a patch of pale wall belonging to the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spa, leaned up against it out of the pedestrian flow, lit up and pulled out his mobile phone. After some listening and fast-forwarding, he managed to locate that part of Hannah's recorded testimony that dealt with those moments immediately preceding Ginny Prewitt's fall past her window.

…_to__w__ards__the__b__e__droom,__I__h__e__ard__shouting.__Sh__e__—__Ginny__—was__saying,__"__It__'__s too la__t__e__,__I__'v__e__a__l__r__e__ady__do__n__e__i__t__,"__and__then__a__man__said,__"__Y__ou're a__lying__fuc__k__ing__bi__t__c__h," and the__n__—and then he__threw her o__ve__r. I __a__c__tua__l__ly saw her fall._

He could just make out the tiny chink of Longbottom's glass hitting the table top.

Potter rewound again and listened.

…_saying,__ "__It__'__s__too__la__t__e__,__I__'__v__e__already__done__i__t__,"__and__then__a__man__said,__"__Y__ou're a lying__fuc__k__ing__bi__t__c__h,"__a__n__d__the__n__—and__then__he__threw__h__e__r__o__ve__r.__I__a__c__tua__l__ly__s__aw__h__e__r fa__l__l._

He recalled Hannah's imitation of Prewitt's flailing arms, and the horror on her frozen face as she did it. Slipping his mobile back into his pocket, he took out his notebook and began to make notes for himself.

Potter had met countless liars; he could smell them; and he knew perfectly well that Hannah was of their number. She could not have heard what she claimed to have heard from her flat; the police had therefore deduced that she could not have heard it at all. Against Potter's expectation, however, in spite of the fact that every piece of evidence he had heard until this moment suggested that Ginny Prewitt had committed suicide, he found himself convinced that Hannah Longbottom really believed that she had overheard an argument before Prewitt fell. That was the only part of her story that rang with authenticity, an authenticity that shone a garish light on the fakery with which she garnished it.

Potter pushed himself off the wall and began to walk east along Grosvenor Street, paying slightly more attention to traffic, but inwardly recalling Hannah's expression, her tone, her mannerisms, as she spoke of Ginny Prewitt's final moments.

Why would she tell the truth on the essential point, but surround it with easily disproven falsehoods? Why would she lie about what she had been doing when she heard shouting from Prewitt's flat? Potter remembered Adler: "A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous." Hannah had come along today to make a last attempt to find someone who would believe her, and yet swallow the lies in which she insisted on swaddling her evidence.

He walked fast, barely conscious of the twinges from his right knee. At last he realized that he had walked all along Maddox Street and emerged on Regent Street. The red awnings of Hamleys Toy Shop fluttered a little in the distance, and Potter remembered that he had intended to buy a birthday present for his nephew's forthcoming birthday on the way back to the office.

The multicolored, squeaking, flashing maelstrom into which he walked registered on him only vaguely. Blindly he moved from floor to floor, untroubled by the shrieks, the whirring of airborne toy helicopters, the oinks of mechanical pigs moving across his distracted path. Finally, after twenty minutes or so, he came to rest near the HM Forces dolls. Here he stood, quite still, gazing at the ranks of miniature marines and paratroopers but barely seeing them; deaf to the whispers of parents trying to maneuver their sons around him, too intimidated to ask the strange, huge, staring man to move.


	15. Chapter 15

IT STARTED TO RAIN ON Wednesday. London weather; dank and gray, through which the old city presented a stolid front: pale faces under black umbrellas, the eternal smell of damp clothing, the steady pattering on Potter's office window in the night.

The rain in Cornwall had a different quality, when it came: Potter remembered how it had lashed like whips against the panes of Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon's spare room, during those months in the neat little house that smelled of flowers and baking, while he had attended the village school in St. Mawes. Such memories swam to the forefront of his mind whenever he was about to see Lucy.

Raindrops were still dancing exuberantly on the windowsills on Friday afternoon, while at opposite ends of her desk, Hermione wrapped Jack's new paratrooper doll, and Potter wrote her a check to the amount of a week's work, minus the commission of Temporary Solutions. Hermione was about to attend the third of that week's "proper" interviews, and was looking neat and groomed in her black suit, with her bright gold hair pinned back in a chignon.

"There you are," they both said simultaneously, as Hermione pushed across the desk a perfect parcel patterned with small spaceships, and Potter held out the check.

"Cheers," said Potter, taking the present. "I can't wrap."

"I hope he likes it," she replied, tucking the check away in her black handbag. "Yeah. And good luck with the interview. D'you want the job?"

"Well, it's quite a good one. Human resources in a media consultancy in the West End," she said, sounding unenthusiastic. "Enjoy the party. I'll see you Monday."

The self-imposed penance of walking down into Denmark Street to smoke became even more irksome in the ceaseless rain. Potter stood, minimally shielded beneath the overhang of his office entrance, and asked himself when he was going to kick the habit and set to work to restore the fitness that had slipped away along with his solvency and his domestic comfort. His mobile rang while he stood there.

"Thought you might like to know your tip-off's paid dividends," said Gilderoy Lockhart, who sounded triumphant. Potter could hear engine noise and the sound of men talking in the background.

"Quick work," commented Potter. "Yeah, well, we don't hang around."

"Does this mean I'm going to get what I was after?"

"That's what I'm calling about. It's a bit late today, but I'll bike it over

Monday."

"Sooner rather than later suits me. I can hang on here at the office."

Lockhart laughed a little offensively.

"You get paid by the hour, don't you? I'd've thought it suited you to string it out a bit."

"Tonight would be better. If you can get it here this evening, I'll make sure you're the first to know if my old mate drops any more tip-offs."

In the slight pause that followed, Potter heard one of the men in the car with

Lockhart say:

"…_F__e__arn__e__y__'s fu__ck__ing __f__a__c__e_…"

"Yeah, all right," said Lockhart. "I'll get it over later. Might not be till seven. Will you still be there?"

"I'll make sure I am," Potter replied.

The file arrived three hours later, while he was eating fish and chips out of a small polystyrene tray in his lap and watching the London evening news on his portable television. The courier buzzed the outer door and Potter signed for a bulky package sent from Scotland Yard. Once unwrapped, a thick gray folder full of photocopied material was disclosed. Potter took it back to Hermione's desk, and began the lengthy process of digesting the contents.

Here were statements from those who had seen Ginny Prewitt during the final evening of her life; a report on the DNA evidence lifted from her flat; photocopied pages of the visitors' book complied by security at number 18, Kentigern Gardens; details of the medication Ginny had been prescribed to control bipolar disorder; the autopsy report; medical records for the previous year; mobile phone and landline records; and a precis of the findings on the model's laptop. There was also a DVD, on which Lockhart had scribbled CCTV 2 Runners.

The DVD drive on Potter's secondhand computer had not worked since he

acquired it; he therefore slipped the disc into the pocket of the overcoat hanging

by the glass door, and resumed his contemplation of the printed material contained within the ring-binder, his notebook open beside him.

Night descended outside the office, and a pool of golden light fell from the desk lamp on to each page as Potter methodically read the documents that had added up to a conclusion of suicide. Here, amid the statements shorn of superfluity, minutely detailed timings, the copied labels from the bottles of drugs found in Prewitt's bathroom cabinet, Potter tracked the truth he had sensed behind Hannah Longbottom's lies.

The autopsy indicated that Ginny had been killed on impact with the road, and that she had died from a broken neck and internal bleeding. There was a certain amount of bruising to the upper arms. She had fallen wearing only one shoe. The photographs of the corpse confirmed GinnyMyInspirationForeva's assertion that Prewitt had changed her clothes on coming home from the nightclub. Instead of the dress in which she had been photographed entering her building, the corpse wore a sequined top and trousers.

Potter turned to the shifting statements that Hannah had given to the police; the first simply claiming a trip to the bathroom from the bedroom; the second adding the opening of her sitting-room window. Neville, she said, had been in bed throughout. The police had found half a line of cocaine on the flat marble rim of the bath, and a small plastic bag of the drug hidden inside a box of Tampax in the cabinet above the sink.

Neville's statement confirmed that he had been asleep when Prewitt fell, and that he had been woken by his wife's screams; he said that he had hurried into the sitting room in time to see Hannah run past him in her underwear. The vase of roses he had sent to Thomas, and which a clumsy policeman had smashed, were intended, he admitted, as a gesture of welcome and introduction; yes, he would have been glad to strike up an acquaintance with the rapper, and yes, it had crossed his mind that Thomas might be perfect in a thriller now in development. His shock at Prewitt's death had undoubtedly made him overreact to the ruin of his floral gift. He had initially believed his wife when she said she had overheard the argument upstairs; he had subsequently come, reluctantly, to accept the police view that Hannah's account was indicative of cocaine consumption. Her drug habit had placed great strain on the marriage, and he had admitted to the police that he was aware that his wife habitually used the stimulant, though he had not known that she had a supply in the flat that night.

Longbottom further stated that he and Prewitt had never visited each other's flats, and that their simultaneous stay at Dickie Carbury's (which the police appeared to have heard about on a subsequent occasion, for Neville had been reinterviewed after the initial statement) had barely advanced their acquaintance. "She associated mainly with the younger guests, while I spent most of the

weekend with Dickie, who is a contemporary of mine." Longbottom's statement presented the unassailable front of a rock face without crampons.

After reading the police account of events inside the Longbottoms' flat, Potter added several sentences to his own notes. He was interested in the half a line of cocaine on the side of the bath, and even more interested in the few seconds after Hannah had seen the flailing figure of Ginny Prewitt fall past the window. Much would depend, of course, on the layout of the Longbottoms' apartment (there was no map or diagram of it in the folder), but Potter was bothered by one consistent aspect of Hannah's shifting stories: she insisted throughout that her husband had been in bed, asleep, when Prewitt fell. He remembered the way she had shielded her face, by pretending to push back her hair, as he pressed her on the point. All in all, and notwithstanding the police view, Potter considered the precise location of both Longbottoms at the moment Ginny Prewitt fell off her balcony to be far from proven.

He resumed his systematic perusal of the file. Michael Corner's statement conformed in most respects to Lockhart's secondhand tale. He admitted to having attempted to prevent his girlfriend leaving Uzi by seizing her by the upper arms. She had broken free and left; he had followed her shortly afterwards. There was a one-sentence mention of the wolf mask, couched in the unemotional language of the policeman who had interviewed him: "I am accustomed to wearing a wolf's- head mask when I wish to avoid the attentions of photographers." A brief statement from the driver who had taken Corner from Uzi confirmed Corner's account of visiting Kentigern Gardens and moving on to d' Arblay Street, where he had dropped his passenger and left. The antipathy Lockhart claimed the driver had felt towards Corner was not conveyed in the bald factual account prepared for his signature by the police.

There were a couple of other statements supporting Corner's: one from a woman who claimed to have seen him climbing the stairs to his dealer's, one from the dealer, Whycliff, himself. Potter recalled Lockhart's expressed opinion that Whycliff would lie for Corner. The woman downstairs could have been cut in on any payment. The rest of the witnesses who claimed to have seen Corner roaming the streets of London could only honestly say that they had seen a man in a wolf mask.

Potter lit a cigarette and read through Corner's statement again. He was a man with a violent temper, who had admitted to attempting to force Ginny to remain in the club. The bruising to the upper arms of the body was almost certainly his work. If, however, he had taken heroin with Whycliff, Potter knew that the odds of him being in a fit state to infiltrate number 18, Kentigern Gardens, or to work himself into a murderous rage, were negligible. Potter was familiar with the behavior of heroin addicts; he had met plenty at the last squat his mother had lived in. The drug rendered its slaves passive and docile; the absolute antithesis of shouting, violent alcoholics, or twitchy, paranoid coke-

users. Potter had known every kind of substance-abuser, both inside the army and out. The glorification of Corner's habit by the media disgusted him. There was no glamour in heroin. Potter's mother had died on a filthy mattress in the corner of the room, and nobody had realized she was dead for six hours.

He got up, crossed the room and wrenched open the dark, rain-spattered window, so that the thud of the bass from the 12 Bar Café became louder than ever. Still smoking, he looked out at Charing Cross Road, glittering with car lights and puddles, where Friday-night revelers were striding and lurching past the end of Denmark Street, umbrellas wobbling, laughter ringing above the traffic. When, Potter wondered, would he next enjoy a pint on a Friday with friends? The notion seemed to belong to a different universe, a life left behind. The strange limbo in which he was living, with Hermione his only real human contact, could not last, but he was still not ready to resume a proper social life. He had lost the army, and Astoria and half a leg; he felt a need to become thoroughly accustomed to the man he had become, before he felt ready to expose himself to other people's surprise and pity. The bright orange cigarette stub flew down into the dark street and was extinguished in the watery gutter; Potter pushed down the window, returned to his desk and pulled the file firmly back towards him.

Tom Wilson's statement told him nothing he did not already know. There was no mention in the file of Colin Creevy, or of his mysterious blue piece of paper. Potter turned next, with some interest, to the statements of the two women with whom Ginny had spent her final afternoon, Daphne Greengrass and Bryony Radford.

The makeup artist remembered Ginny as cheerful and excited about Dean Thomas's imminent arrival. Greengrass, however, stated that Prewitt "had not been herself," that she had seemed "low and anxious," and had refused to discuss what was upsetting her. Greengrass's statement added an intriguing detail that nobody had yet told Potter. The model asserted that Prewitt had made specific mention, that afternoon, of an intention to leave "everything" to her brother. No context was given; but the impression left was of a girl in a clearly morbid frame of mind.

Potter wondered why his client had not mentioned that his sister had declared her intention of leaving him everything. Of course, Weasley already had a trust fund. Perhaps the possible acquisition of further vast sums of money did not seem as noteworthy to him as it would to Potter, who had never inherited a penny.

Yawning, Potter lit another cigarette to keep himself awake, and began to read the statement of Ginny's mother. By Lady Molly Weasley's own account, she had been drowsy and unwell in the aftermath of her operation; but she insisted that her daughter had been "perfectly happy" when she came to visit that morning, and had evinced nothing but concern for her mother's condition and prospects of

recovery. Perhaps the blunt, unnuanced prose of the recording officer was to blame, but Potter took from Lady Weasley's recollections the impression of a determined denial. She alone suggested that Ginny's death had been an accident, that she had somehow slipped over the balcony without meaning to; it had been, said Lady Weasley, an icy night.

Potter skim-read Weasley's statement, which tallied in all respects with the account he had given Potter in person, and proceeded to that of Gideon Prewitt, Ronald and Ginny's uncle. He had visited Molly Weasley at the same time as Ginny on the day before the latter's death, and asserted that his niece had seemed "normal." Prewitt had then driven to Oxford, where he had attended a conference on international developments in family law, staying overnight in the Malmaison Hotel. His account of his whereabouts was followed by some incomprehensible comments about telephone calls. Potter turned, for elucidation, to the annotated copies of phone records.

Ginny had barely used her landline in the week prior to her death, and not at all on the day before she died. From her mobile, however, she had made no fewer than sixty-six calls on her last day of life. The first, at 9:15 in the morning, had been to Michael Corner; the second, at 9:35, to Daphne Greengrass. There followed a gap of hours, in which she had spoken to nobody on the mobile, and then, at 1:21, she had begun a positive frenzy of telephoning two numbers, almost alternately. One of these was Corner's; the other belonged, according to the crabbed scribble beside the number's first appearance, to Gideon Prewitt. Again and again she had telephoned these two men. Here and there were gaps of twenty minutes or so, during which she made no calls; then she would begin telephoning again, doubtless hitting "redial." All of this frenetic calling, Potter deduced, must have taken place once she was back in her flat with Bryony Radford and Daphne Greengrass, though neither of the two women's statements made mention of repeated telephoning.

Potter turned back to Gideon Prewitt's statement, which cast no light on the reason his niece had been so anxious to contact him. He had turned off the sound on his mobile while at the conference, he said, and had not realized until much later that his niece had called him repeatedly that afternoon. He had no idea why she had done so and had not called her back, giving as his reason that by the time he realized that she had been trying to reach him, she had stopped calling, and he had guessed, correctly as it turned out, that she would be in a nightclub somewhere.

Potter was now yawning every few minutes; he considered making himself coffee, but could not muster the energy. Wanting his bed, but driven on by habit to complete the job in hand, he turned to the copies of security logbook pages showing the entrances and exits of visitors to number 18 on the day preceding Ginny Prewitt's death. A careful perusal of signatures and initials revealed that Wilson had not been as meticulous in his record-keeping as his employers might

have hoped. As Wilson had already told Potter, the movements of the building's residents were not recorded in the book; so the comings and goings of Prewitt and the Longbottoms were missing. The first entry Wilson had made was for the postman, at 9:10; next, at 9:22, came Florist delivery Flat 2; finally, at 9:50, Securibell. No time of departure was marked for the alarm checker.

Otherwise it had been (as Wilson had said) a quiet day. Daphne Greengrass had arrived at 12:50; Bryony Radford at 1:20. While Radford's departure was recorded with her own signature at 4:40, Wilson had added the entrance of caterers to the Longbottoms' flat at 7, Daphne's exit with Ginny at 7:15 and the departure of the caterers at 9:15.

It frustrated Potter that the only page that the police had photocopied was the day before Prewitt's death, because he had hoped that he might find the surname of the elusive Rochelle somewhere in the entrance log's pages.

It was nearly midnight when Potter turned his attention to the police report on the contents of Prewitt's laptop. They appeared to have been searching, principally, for emails indicating suicidal mood or intent, and in this respect they had been unsuccessful. Potter scanned the emails Prewitt had sent and received in the last two weeks of her life.

It was strange, but nevertheless true, that the countless photographs of her otherworldly beauty had made it harder rather than easier for Potter to believe that Prewitt had ever really existed. The ubiquity of her features had made them seem abstract, generic, even if the face itself had been uniquely beautiful.

Now, however, out of these dry black marks on paper, out of erratically spelled messages littered with in-jokes and nicknames, the wraith of the dead girl rose before him in the dark office. Her emails gave him what the multitude of photographs had not: a realization in the gut, rather than the brain, that a real, living, laughing and crying human being had been smashed to death on that snowy London street. He had hoped to spot the flickering shadow of a murderer as he turned the file's pages, but instead it was the ghost of Ginny herself who emerged, gazing up at him, as victims of violent crimes sometimes did, through the detritus of their interrupted lives.

He saw, now, why Ronald Weasley insisted that his sister had had no thought of death. The girl who had typed out these words emerged as a warmhearted friend, sociable, impulsive, busy and glad to be so; enthusiastic about her job, excited, as Weasley had said, about the prospect of a trip to Morocco.

Most of the emails had been sent to the designer Draco Malfoy. They held nothing of interest except a tone of cheery confidentiality, and, once, a mention of her most incongruous friendship:

Draci, will you pleeeeeze make Rochelle something for her birthday,

please please? I'll pay. Something nice (don't be horrible). For Feb

21st? Pleezy please. Love ya. Red.

Potter remembered the assertion of GinnyMyInspirationForeva that Ginny had loved Draco Malfoy "like a brother." His statement to the police was the shortest in the file. He had been in Japan for a week and had arrived home on the night of her death. Potter knew that Malfoy lived within easy walking distance of Kentigern Gardens, but the police appeared to have been satisfied with his assertion that, once home, he had simply gone to bed. Potter had already noted the fact that anyone walking from Charles Street would have approached Kentigern Gardens from the opposite direction to the CCTV camera on Alderbrook Road.

Potter closed the file at last. As he moved laboriously through his office, undressing, removing the prosthesis and unfolding the camp bed, he thought of nothing but his own exhaustion. He fell asleep quickly, lulled by the sounds of humming traffic, the pattering rain and the deathless breath of the city.


	16. Chapter 16

A LARGE MAGNOLIA TREE STOOD in the front garden of Lucy's house in Bromley. Later in the spring it would cover the front lawn in what looked like crumpled tissues; now, in April, it was a frothy cloud of white, its petals waxy as coconut shavings. Potter had only visited this house a few times, because he preferred to meet Lucy away from her home, where she always seemed most harried, and to avoid encounters with his brother-in-law, for whom his feelings were on the cooler side of tepid.

Helium-filled balloons, tied to the gate, bobbled in the light breeze. As Potter walked down the steeply sloping front path to the door, the package Hermione had wrapped under his arm, he told himself that it would soon be over.

"Where's Astoria?" demanded Lucy, short, blonde and round-faced, immediately upon opening the front door.

More big golden foil balloons, this time in the shape of the number seven, filled the hall behind her. Screams that might have denoted excitement or pain were issuing from some unseen region of the house, disturbing the suburban peace.

"She had to go back to Ayr for the weekend," lied Potter.

"Why?" asked Lucy, standing back to let him in.

"Another crisis with her sister. Where's Jack?"

"They're all through here. Thank God it's stopped raining, or we'd have had to have them in the house," said Lucy, leading him out into the back garden.

They found his three nephews tearing around the large back lawn with twenty assorted boys and girls in party clothes, who were shrieking their way through some game that involved running to various cricket stumps on which pictures of pieces of fruit had been taped. Parent helpers stood around in the weak sunlight, drinking wine out of plastic cups, while Lucy's husband, Ernie, manned an iPod standing in a dock on a trestle table. Lucy handed Potter a lager, then dashed away from him almost immediately, to pick up the youngest of her three sons, who had fallen hard and was bawling with gusto.

Potter had never wanted children; it was one of the things on which he and Astoria had always agreed, and it had been one of the reasons other relationships over the years had foundered. Lucy deplored his attitude, and the reasons he gave for it; she was always miffed when he stated life aims that differed from hers, as though he were attacking her decisions and choices.

"All right, there, Harry?" said Ernie, who had handed over the control of the music to another father. Potter's brother-in-law was a quantity surveyor, who never seemed quite sure what tone to take with Potter, and usually settled for a combination of chippiness and aggression that Potter found irksome. "Where's that gorgeous Astoria? Not split up again, have you? Ha ha ha. I can't keep track."

One of the little girls had been pushed over: Ernie hurried off to help one of the other mothers deal with more tears and grass stains. The game roared on in chaos. At last, a winner was declared; there were more tears from the runner-up, who had to be placated with a consolation prize from the black bin bag sitting beside the hydrangeas. A second round of the same game was then announced.

"Hi there!" said a middle-aged matron, sidling up to Potter. "You must be Lucy's brother!"

"Yeah," he said.

"We heard all about your poor leg," she said, staring down at his shoes. "Lucy kept us all posted. Gosh, you wouldn't even know, would you? I couldn't even see you limping when you arrived. Isn't it amazing what they can do these days? I expect you can run faster now than you could before!"

Perhaps she imagined that he had a single carbon-fiber prosthetic blade under his trousers, like a Paralympian. He sipped his lager, and forced a humorless smile.

"Is it true?" she asked, ogling him, her face suddenly full of naked curiosity. "Are you really James Potter's son?"

Some thread of patience, which Potter had not realized was strained to breaking point, snapped.

"Fucked if I know," he said. "Why don't you call him and ask?"

She looked stunned. After a few seconds, she walked away from him in silence. He saw her talking to another woman, who glanced towards Potter. Another child fell over, crashing its head on to the cricket stump decorated with a giant strawberry, and emitting an ear-splitting shriek. With all attention focused on the fresh casualty, Potter slipped back inside the house.

The front room was blandly comfortable, with a beige three-piece suite, an Impressionist print over the mantelpiece and framed photographs of his three nephews in their bottle-green school uniform displayed on shelves. Potter closed the door carefully on the noise from the garden, took from his pocket the DVD Lockhart had sent, inserted it into the player and turned on the TV.

There was a photograph on top of the set, taken at Lucy's thirtieth birthday party. Lucy's father, Rick, was there with his second wife. Potter stood at the back, where he had been placed in every group photograph since he was five years old. He had been in possession of two legs then. Tracey, fellow SIB officer and the girl whom Lucy had hoped her brother would marry, was standing next to him. Tracey had subsequently married one of their mutual friends, and had recently given birth to a daughter. Potter had meant to send flowers, but had never got round to it.

He dropped his gaze to the screen, and pressed "play."

The grainy black-and-white footage began immediately. A white street, thick blobs of snow drifting past the eye of the camera. The 180° view showed the intersection of Bellamy and Alderbrook Roads.

A man walked, alone, into view, from the right side of the screen; tall, his hands deep in his pockets, swathed in layers, a hood over his head. His face looked strange in the black-and-white footage; it tricked the eye; Potter thought that he was looking at a stark white lower face and a dark blindfold, before reason told him that he was in fact looking at a dark upper face, and a white scarf tied over the nose, mouth and chin. There was some kind of mark, perhaps a blurry logo, on his jacket; otherwise his clothing was unidentifiable.

As the walker approached the camera, he bowed his head and appeared to consult something he drew out of his pocket. Seconds later, he turned up Bellamy Road and disappeared out of range of the camera. The digital clock in the lower right-hand portion of the screen registered 01:39.

The film jumped. Here again was the blurred view of the same intersection, apparently deserted, the same heavy flakes of snow obscuring the view, but now the clock in the lower corner read 02:12.

The two runners burst into view. The one in front was recognizable as the man who had walked out of range with his white scarf over his mouth; long-legged and powerful, he ran, his arms pumping, straight back down Alderbrook Road. The second man was smaller, slighter, hooded and hatted; Potter noticed the dark fists, clenched as he pelted along behind the first, losing ground to the taller man all the way. Under a street lamp, a design on the back of his sweatshirt was briefly illuminated; halfway along Alderbrook Road he veered suddenly left and up a side street.

Potter replayed the few seconds' footage again, and then again. He saw no sign of communication between the two runners; no sign that they had called to each other, or even looked for each other, as they sprinted away from the camera. It seemed to have been every man for himself.

He replayed the footage for a fourth time, and froze it, after several attempts, at the second when the design on the back of the slower man's sweatshirt had been illuminated. Squinting at the screen, he edged closer to the blurry picture. After a minute's prolonged staring, he was almost sure that the first word ended in "ck," but the second, which he thought began with a "J," was indecipherable.

He pressed "play" and let the film run on, trying to make out which street the second man had taken. Three times Potter watched him split away from his companion, and although its name was unreadable onscreen, he knew, from what Lockhart had said, that it must be Halliwell Street.

The police had thought that the fact that the first man had picked up a friend off-camera diminished his plausibility as a killer. This was assuming that the two were, indeed, friends. Potter had to concede that the fact that they had been caught on film together, in such weather, and at such an hour, acting in an almost identical fashion, suggested complicity.

Allowing the footage to run on, he watched as it cut, in almost startling fashion, to the interior of a bus. A girl got on; filmed from a position above the driver, her face was foreshortened and heavily shadowed, though her blonde ponytail was distinctive. The man who followed her on to the bus bore, as far as it was possible to see, a strong resemblance to the one who had later walked up Bellamy Street towards Kentigern Gardens. He was tall and hooded, with a white scarf over his face, the upper part lost in shadow. All that was clear was the logo on his chest, a stylized GS.

The film jerked to show Theobalds Road. If the individual walking fast along it was the same person who had got on the bus, he had removed his white scarf, although his build and walk were strongly reminiscent. This time, Potter thought that the man was making a conscious effort to keep his head bowed.

The film ended in a blank black screen. Potter sat looking at it, deep in thought. When he recalled himself to his surroundings, it was a slight surprise to find them multicolored and sunlit.

He took his mobile out of his pocket and called Ronald Weasley, but reached only voicemail. He left a message telling Weasley that he had now viewed the CCTV footage and read the police file; that there were a few more things he would like to ask, and would it be possible to meet Weasley sometime during the following week.

He then called Tom Wilson, whose telephone likewise went to voicemail, to which he reiterated his request to come and view the interior of 18 Kentigern Gardens.

Potter had just hung up when the sitting-room door opened, and his middle nephew, Jack, sidled in. He looked flushed and overwrought.

"I heard you talking," Jack said. He closed the door just as carefully as his uncle had done.

"Aren't you supposed to be in the garden, Jack?"

"I've been for a pee," said his nephew. "Uncle Harry, did you bring me a present?"

Potter, who had not relinquished the wrapped parcel since arriving, handed it over and watched as Hermione's careful handiwork was destroyed by small, eager fingers.

"_Cool,"_ said Jack happily. "A _soldier."_

"That's right," said Potter.

"He's got a gun an' _dev'rything."_

"Yeah, he has."

"Did you have a gun when you were a soldier?" asked Jack, turning over the box to look at the picture of its contents.

"I had two," said Potter.

"Have you still got them?"

"No, I had to give them back."

"Shame," said Jack, matter-of-factly.

"Aren't you supposed to be playing?" asked Potter, as renewed shrieks erupted from the garden.

"I don't wanna," said Jack. "Can I take him out?"

"Yeah, all right," said Potter.

While Jack ripped feverishly at the box, Potter slipped Lockhart's DVD out of the player and pocketed it. Then he helped Jack to free the plastic paratrooper from the restraints holding him to the cardboard insert, and to fix his gun into his hand.

Lucy found them both sitting there ten minutes later. Jack was making his soldier fire around the back of the sofa and Potter was pretending to have taken a bullet to the stomach.

"For God's sake, Harry, it's his party, he's supposed to be playing with the others! Jack, I _told_ you you weren't allowed to open any presents yet—pick it up—no, it'll have to stay in here—_no,_ Jack, you can play with it later—it's nearly time for tea anyway…"

Flustered and irritable, Lucy ushered her reluctant son back out of the room with a dark backwards look at her brother. When Lucy's lips were pursed she bore a strong resemblance to their Aunt Joan, who was no blood relation to either of them.

The fleeting similarity engendered in Potter an uncharacteristic spirit of cooperation. He behaved, in Lucy's terms, well throughout the rest of the party, devoting himself in the main to defusing brewing arguments between various overexcited children, then barricading himself behind a trestle table covered in jelly and ice cream, thus avoiding the intrusive interest of the prowling mothers.


End file.
